Creatives, Design
5 Tips to Make Your Church Website Design Impactful
More and more I hear my Pastor talking about how new visitors decided to come to our church after visiting our website.
This is great news! But it proves something: The days of looking for a new church to visit in the yellow pages are over. More and more people are entering, “church” and “city name” into a search engine and going that route.
If you have an established church or are launching one, then a web presence is critical to sustaining growth. However, unlike the promise of “If you build it, he will come” in the film Field of Dreams, a church website will not attract people simply because it is built.
Drawing on the principles laid out in Smashing Magazine article ‘10 Principles of Effective Web Design’, here are some ways to keep website visitors from hitting the back button and leading them to attending your church.
Keep It Clean
Too many churches attempt to cram every bit of information they can on to the home page. It does nothing but create a mess.
Get rid of the clutter.
Remember, many visitors to the website have never been there before. If visitors feel overwhelmed with information, they could just hit the “back” button on their browser and look elsewhere.
Make It Inviting
It doesn’t have to be one those flash-based customer representatives you see on some sites, but just as we should be welcoming in the church, the website should also be a place where visitors are made to feel welcome.
It’s easy enough to do.
A button or a link brings people to a page that answers “When?” and “Where?” with some other information is all it takes. Don’t make visitors scour your site looking for directions and service times.
Keep It Fresh
Keep everything up to date. If the information you have on the site is months or even weeks old, people will wonder if you’re even around anymore. Nothing says “lamesauce” like a “Calendar of Events” that still has Christmas information during the Easter season.
Make It Easy To Navigate
If you can keep them at the home page and they want to dig deeper, be sure visitors can do it with ease.
This means having simple menus and sub-menus to take them to the content they want to see.
Visitors should know where they are, where they have been and where they want to go. I personally love what Northpoint has done. On their home page at the top right is this nice graphic:
When the link at the top of the page is clicked, it expands to show a list of all of the areas of the site one may want to visit. Hover over the links and it provides an explanation. Fantastic stuff.
Make Sure It Is Fast
This has less to do with design and more to do with functionality, but the two go hand in hand.
A slow loading page will make somebody go somewhere else. The majority of people have broadband Internet access and want pages to load fast. If they have to wait for more than just a few seconds for the page to load, they’ll hit that back button.
What about you? What principles do you subscribe to that church websites should seek to follow?
Buzz it!
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16 Responses to “5 Tips to Make Your Church Website Design Impactful”
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Jay, Thanks. I’m in the middle of a design “stalemate” right now. I just emailed my designer and sent him your link and told him to follow these principles and do what we signed him on to do…design. Thanks for the re-focus here.
word up!!!!!!!
Thanks Ben. This is actually where I get to be on the outside looking in somewhat. I’m a “creative” but not a web designer, but as a “consumer” I’ve seen enough poorly designed websites to know what works.
Great post. These are important principles to keep in mind for sure. It’s true that more people are searching online for churches to get a feel of what they’re about – so we need to make a strong first impression.
as best as we can!
It’s big. My own church could improve their design, but it is a major upgrade from what it was just over a year ago. That being said, it’s head and shoulders above what others have in the area and people say so.
Good tips, Jay!
Thanks Paul!
Good tips, Jay! Strong principles to keep in mind on any design. Thanks!
i thought it was good too!
Thanks Brett. I appreciate it.
Get rid of the “Give Online” button. This was a popular topic here.
I’ll just reiterate what I said there:
I think this also really stretches us beyond the “if you build they will come” mentality.
Incidentally- our church doesn’t do the give button. BUT- they do have a completely separate site (as in no links between the two at all) for giving online.
Make It Easy To Navigate:
We changed our navigation menu after realizing that most people didn’t click the first item in a drop down menu (like the menus at the top of churchcreate.com for Community, Creatives, Engineering, Environments). We moved important content out of the main sections and put it in the subsections.
love that!
The last point wins. Fast. Google is spending billions of dollars to speed up the internet (ie. Chrome) and it’s rumored that load times on independent websites will start to effect their Page Rank soon. (Maybe it already does…)