What is content? Content is mostly thought of as information on websites. It's a written article, a video clip, audio clip or an image. This can be static information or it can reside in a database and delivered dynamically.

What about data from a database other than the one connected to the website, such as a list of individuals who sing in the choir, real time financial information from an accounting system, Attendance statistics, the people I need to followup with that visited the church, etc. This information should be available to the people who need to see it but not anyone else and it should be available through a website.

When a member visits the church's website, their experience and what they see should be unique to them. My daughters are 16 and 20 years old. One is in high school and the other is a junior in college. I'm a married 52 year old father of two daughters. When I go to the church website I would like to see information that's relevant to me as a parent.

I've been in a small group for 10 years. For the first 5 years I was the leader of the group. A small group should have a website as part of the church website that the group controls. The church staff can maintain oversight if they like but the content is our responsibility. And it's only available to members of our small group. When I add someone else to the group, then they also have access to the website. The same would be true for my sunday school class, any committees I serve on or any other group I belong to in the church.

Content is information. It doesn't matter if it the Pastor's latest sermon, members of a committee, pictures of kids, audio clips, financial data from the General Ledger, last weeks attendance or any other information that's important to the church. Content should be available to display on the website and it should be relevant to who I am.

Much of this functionality is available today in the ACS Technologies products. We'll continue adding to our product and everything I described will be available in the near future. Let me know what you think.