Me, the jerk
As you may or may not know, I'm a frequenter of the site Church Marketing Sucks. I love its sarcastic tone, and at the same time, its end goal - helping the Church get past the rut of status-quo that we often find ourselves in. They have a weekly peer website review, in which a church submits a newly designed website. To summarize, these websites are usually everything that Stylegala is not. This often frustrates me, knowing that money changed hands for sites done in table-based layouts, font tags, and missing doctypes.
Yet, I feel that sometimes I am too harsh. Rather than being encouraging, I tend to view these Christian web agencies as out to take advantage of churches. Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt. It is possible that they've never heard of web standards, and are simply doing their jobs day in, day out, as they've done since the 1990s.
So, here is my question to you, how do I, we - designers and developers concerned with web-standards, inform the Church and Christian design agencies, that there is a better way to handle the web? I'm curious as to how I should go about doing this tactfully. The most certain way to get across the seriousness of the situation is to be very blunt, but this is not always the best way to present oneself in the character of Christ-likeness.
I've often thought of having a Mediocrity Watch List of sorts, ranking Christian agencies by their compliance with web-standards, so that church pastors would have a go-to list to compare what they're getting for their money. However, I don't know if this would be the most sensitive way to present such information. Instead, I'm thinking of featuring freelancers, and agencies that are helping the Church through web-standards. So, give me your feedback and tell me how you think this would best be accomplished.