Communicating Belief and Practice Online

Last week, I mostly spoke about the design of the Epic Church website, for this post, I'm going to pay closer attention to the text and the mission that the Epic Church writes about in their website. One of the first things we can deduce from the mission and the text is who is the church's target audience (ie. People already Christians, New Believers, Non-Christians, Families, Youth, Inter-generational). In the case of the Epic Church, the design and text of the website shows that their target audience might be youth, new believers, and minorities. In terms of the youth, this can be seen because of the abundance of representation of younger people:

For new believers we have evidence such as the following:

A lot of their website then shows, shortcuts and easy access to information for new believers and people interested in becoming part of the faith.

Lastly, in terms of minorities, we have the many images of youth I posted above that show minority groups active within the faith, and under this I will post more pictures:

Now that we have thought about the target audience of the website, we can begin to understand the main goal of the website. I believe that the website is trying to bring out 3 important aspects of their faith:

• Experiencing aspects of the church programs/life
• Building relationships with leaders
• Building relationships with members

The first I mention due to the visual aspect of the website, the video playing behind constantly in both the home and about pages. This video shows aspects of the community such as music, coffee talks, community, showing then a couple of aspects of the church life in the Epic Church:

These videos are, then, there to represent aspects of what life is with the Epic Church.

Then, there is also building relationships with leaders, as seen by how the biographies are written for each location pastor and the openness to have people contact them personally through email:

Lastly, I would say that the website showcases building relationships with other members. The best example of this would be the life groups and the 'shopping' list for life groups that include many community groups for different things and hobbies:

And also, the visual aspects of the videos showing a lot of community bonding and outreach.

The religious focus of the website seems centered around their religious philosophy and explaining that to the audience. It seems to be a lot about the services, dedicating a whole page to free recordings of these services, but also seems to be a little centered in outreach, such as the life groups, and the community outreach and eteams section:

In conclusion, based on the mission and belief statements found in the website:

I feel comfortable saying that there is a strong correlation between the mission of the Epic Church and what their website displays. Last week, I spoke of how they include more visuals than text and that could be a way to appeal to the youth and also just to call attention to the aspects of what their religious identity is instead of what they say their religious identity is. I think looking at the mission statement and beliefs and also looking at the 'about' section of the website, its simplicity, and short text, comes back to this very design choice I was speaking of last week. I think it is very clear both through the little text, and the visuals that the Epic Church is focused on community and shared experience.