Ma Hamatzav? (Was’ Up?)

There is a website resource I often recommend to congregations looking to develop their own sites. It’s called Web Pages That Suck, http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/. As the name implies (not so subtly), it is a review of websites that don’t quite measure up to Vincent Flanders’ (and the world’s) idea of decent websites. Flanders includes some great tools to analyze ones own site.

In the spirit of avoiding lashon harah, and without getting too judgemental, you can guess why I recommend it to congregations. There are a lot of bad church websites. Proportionally, there are even more bad synagogue websites.

This post was spurred by a recent email to me from Monique Cuvelier of Talance. Talance is a web development company and Monique has taken on the daunting task of working to improve synagogue sites. Her email asked if I had any exemplory synagogue sites to recommend. My reply was that I didn’t even have any really good sites to recommend. Sure, there are some nice, slick looking synagogue sites out there, all of which are based on Web 1.0 - ‘here’s my information, come look at it.’ While much of the church world has embraced Web 2.0 philosophy (see my post on Cyberculture, http://mahamatzav.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/cyberculture), I’ve yet to see a synagogue use web technology as a way to elicit or solicit information from readers.

I’m encouraged to see that many rabbis are now blogging. That’s a start! Let’s all encourage Monique by reading her blog and taking her suggestions, http://talance.com/blog/!