• Update their personal and family records with the church (change address or phone, add new family member, etc.)
• Register for events sponsored by the church
• Give a tithe or pledge, or even set up an ongoing automatic payment
• Stay in touch with other members in their groups and be able to chat or e-mail
• Get reading material or discussion information related to their small group
• Identify and sign up for volunteer opportunities

What’s the difference between a Web portal and a Web site with links to all of these things?

A Web portal has a consistent “look and feel.” The person using it does not ever feel that they have left the site and gone to a different location. This means consistent headers and footers, font sizes and colors, color schemes, logos and icons, and the general smoothness of the usage.

Often a Web portal will have portlets. In layman’s terms, a portlet is a Web application effectively plugged into and displayed inside a Web page. Examples of portlets include e-mail, weather reports, daily devotions or discussion forums.

How can you turn your Web site into a Web portal?

You probably already keep a lot of information in a church management software (ChMS) package. However, it may only be accessible by the staff and only inside your church offices. What you want is to be able to allow your leaders and members to securely access their own information stored inside your ChMS. And, ideally, if the user makes a change to that information, you want to be able to move it into your ChMS package without having to rekey it.

This can be accomplished in a variety of ways. Check with your ChMS vendor to see if they provide Web applications or portlets to allow you to easily set up your Web portal without a lot of programming.

If not, then ask them if they provide Web services or application programming interfaces (also known as APIs) to allow you to build your own Web portal and access the data. These are bits of software code that have been written to safely pull the information from the ChMS software so you can display it somewhere else. By using these APIs or Web services, you can build your own Web portal or hire a Web consulting firm to build one for you. There are literally hundreds of Web consulting companies that can do this.

A word of warning though: Be careful to build only the Web portal pages, not another whole new database that has to be maintained. It is important that you keep all of the data in one central location and not have multiple databases to maintain. The Web consulting firm should build the portal, but access the data from the ChMS using the proper Web services or APIs.