Effective Church Websites

The financial and time commitment necessary in creating a church website or redesigning an existing one is worth the investment especially if it is used as an effective outreach tool for your ministry as well as an integral part of your church’s daily life. So is it worth it? Consider the following:

• 28 million Americans or 25% of the internet population, visit religious cyberspace, with more than 3 million seeking spiritual material on any given day.
• In 2003 there were more that 726 million users worldwide, an increase of some 200 million in the last year alone.
• There are 145 million adults online in the USA and 166 million of all ages.
• 90% of all children in the USA ages 5-17 (48 million) now use computers, making them the most wired demographic group in the world.
• The number of kids online has tripled since 1997 – including a 40% jump fro 2003 to 2004.
• By the year 2010 20% of the population or more than 50 million people will rely exclusively on the internet for all their faith based news and experience.

These statistics are from George Bana, “This Years Most Intriguing Findings, Dec. 2000. One can only imagine how much the impact has grown since!

If you are saying to yourself “I want our website to improve communication within our church and let potential new members know we are here,” then beware of only reproducing your current brochure or weekly bulletin. Even adding a few links to some activities will not capture the attention of your congregation, let alone draw newcomers in.

While a website should offer the information contained in your print materials, it can do so much more. It can be a tool for both outreach and education, thus addressing the real needs of your people. But first, there must be a reason to visit the site. Potential new members come to visit your church for a reason In the same way, they have to have a reason for coming to the web-site. Similarly your web-site is also a tool to strengthen outreach to your current members. You can become a resource for many of their spiritual needs which will keep them coming back to the site – both your virtual one, and most especially the site made of brick and mortar.

Seth Godin, known as the guru of internet marketing, was asked: Why should churches, without much of a budget and without formal training in marketing, build community online?

His answer: People will talk about you (online and off) if it benefits them, if it makes them feel good, or if they get something psychic out of it. The challenge ism’t to figure out the tactics, it’s to create an experience that’s worthy.

So how do you create a worthy experience the keeps people talking?
You provide meaningful information that addresses the many and diverse needs of your audience: you answer the questions for which they are seeking answers.

Your church is a natural extension of the community; what will those in your community be seeking? How can you provide this support, stay within your mission and reflect your church’s relevancy to the broader questions of life? To carry out the Great Commission churches today, as in the days of the early Church, must read the signs of the times and use the language of the people. Thinking outside the box (keep reading) can create a website which will allow you to reach out, help others, and celebrate your faith - no longer limited by financial or logistical concerns!

This article will provide you with tips for creating a well-designed web-site that will be structured to meet a wide variety of needs within your church: your leadership, congregation and potential new members. A website can have a positive impact on the day-to-day operations of your church and significantly contribute to the growth of your congregation as well as reach the hearts of your people.

The first step in the process is to do a little planning and brainstorming around this question:

What do we want our church website to accomplish?

To answer this effectively, consider the following ideas below.

First, what spiritual information are people looking for on the internet? (www.pewinternet.org/reports/index.asp)

• 67% - information about their own faith.
  
• 50% - information about another faith.
  
• 38% - e-mailed a prayer request.
  
• 38% - downloaded religious music.
  
• 37% - received spiritual guidance via e-mail.
  
• 34% - bought religious items online.
  
• 25% - downloaded sermons.
  
• 21% - sought spiritual guidance via e-mail
  
• 14% - looked for a new church
  
• 3% - participated in online worship

Who is your target audience?

Your audience likely falls into four categories:

• Members – This is a key audience; especially the youth of your church. A simple survey can help you to zone in on what some of their current needs are or have your staff/volunteers interview 3-4 people each from each age group.
• Past Visitors – Those who have already visited have expressed interest by their past presence. Yet, why arena’t they active members?
• Potential Visitors – For some (and this number grows everyday), their decision to come to your church will be based largely (if not exclusively) on who they think you are based upon their visit to your web-site. This group is looking for a place to fulfill their spiritual and pastoral needs – can your web-site show them that your faith community is where to come?
  
• The Un-Churched – While finding a church to attend may not be a priority, this group (the largest online, by far) is seeking answers to their spiritual hungers online. Can your web-site nurture a virtual relationship with this group and be seen as a reliable, relevant source for the information they seek?

Try These Strategies:

Challenge: Bringing new people to your church.
Good news - people are as spiritually hungry as ever!

Some website solutions:

• With a website you are no longer constricted by time, geography, money, or any other resource. The only restriction to spreading the Gospel is your imagination!
  

Who do you want to reach?

• Singles? Offer online resources & tips for Christian dating or divorce recovery resources. Take it a step further and tie these into support groups online or at your church.
  
• Young parents? Try dedicating a page to parenting tips. Parents from your congregation can submit advice, or try an online forum.
  
• Single moms? How about a mom’s morning out group?
  
• Teenagers? Try an online homework club where there is an interactive forum for help from other teens.
  
• Your homepage can be a launching pad to as many groups as you want. If you want to really focus in on a group, create a sub domain with a mini site dedicated to that group’s needs.
  
• Your site can become a “faith portal” for your community.

Demographics

There are certainly other demographics to consider including age, race, family structure (single, divorced, children, etc.), education, income, culture, etc. Examine the demographic of your current congregation and your neighborhood as a start. This will help to focus the type of content used in your site.

A church web-site can contain resources and information beyond the religious. Your content can grow to be a center where your congregation and potential members visit to address the challenges of daily living. Your goal is to provide an experience that fulfills the needs of these visitors. If a resource fits your overall mission and is related to the needs of your people (e.g. an article on parenting, planning for retirement, or a directory of food pantries), consider using it.

Content

So far, we have covered important considerations concerning your audience and later, we will look at some important technical issues, but first, it’s time to do the fun part: your site’s content! This is where the rubber meets the road, in order to meet the needs of your audience, ensure that your site will come up in the search engines and most importantly encourage visits to your church or initiate contact with you consider the following suggestions regarding content:

Your Welcome or Home Page

Your page should have a natural and informal welcome message. Your welcome page will likely determine whether those visiting your site will stay or move on - that decision is made quickly (10 seconds or less!). Your home page should say: WOW this is a group that I want to be a part of! While you will want this message to permeate the site, it’s most critical here.

It is critical that all audience needs are addressed here at some level – but, less is more here. Provide links with very clear descriptions about the content of your site. Details should be saved for when the user clicks on that link.

Avoid using a lot of “churchy” jargon or “insider” language here. Questions to ask yourself are: Would a non-Christian or other visitor to your site understand the terms being used?

Can you rephrase the terminology without loosing the meaning of your message? What about your church bulletin? This is not the place for it. Provide a link for it, but do not post it on the home page. The same applies to weekly schedules of your services/masses. Instead, post a link; saving the space on the home page for content that is rich and informative. If someone is looking for the bulletin or schedule they will likely spend the time to find the link. First impressions are lasting impressions! Therefore, use this space to connect with users, rather than supplying this type of information in the first page…invite them in.

Spreading the Gospel

Consider the content of your web-site from not only a Christian perspective, but also from the point of view of non-Christians. Church leaders tend to use complex, theological language that can overwhelm even the average person in the pew. Simplify your message about your mission to spread the Good News in a way that can lead them to your community to seek answers to their spiritual questions. Ask yourself: Can someone who has never been in a church or read the Bible make sense of my message and does it draw them to want to learn more?

Outreach

Many will seek a church as a place they can receive help and counsel for problems they are facing. Your site should clearly explain how to receive counsel for various problems and even offer basic information for various issues as a resource. For example, What is an annulment? Is your family affected by addiction? Are you a new parent returning to work? Do you have aging parents and find caring for them stressful? Are you unemployed? How do you select a good school for your children? And the list goes on. Can your church web-site offer guidance on these or other concerns?

A church is also an extension of the community; your site should describe the outreach and service projects your congregation is involved in. Tell your story of how, as a community, you live the Gospel. Are there opportunities for families, youth, and seniors? How can people get involved? This is a great way to demonstrate how active and vibrant your community is. Those under 35 are greatly motivated to action if they feel that they are making a real contribution to something larger than themselves - they want to change the world. They will join your mission if it is authentic. They just need an invitation to start. What a great opportunity!

Building Community

What is it about your community that makes it special, how is it different from the other options that are out there? Your members and visitors feel this benefit. Our culture offers choice in all aspects of living. There are simply too many options out there competing for time and attention. If you cannot differentiate your mission, you will likely struggle to survive.

How do you build community? A church is its people not the building. Always think: relationships. Therefore, consider including biographies of some of your members, maybe include a story or two about their faith journey. How about some editorial content written by members about activities and experiences they have had at your church and how they have grown? Use a diverse range of contributors that include families, singles, young people, seniors, and look for cultural and ethnic balance that reflects who you are. Remembering who your target audience is will help define the lifestyles you highlight. Can they identify with you?

Youth and Kids

Your site needs to do an exceptional job explaining the activities and programs available for young people. Be sure it is inviting for those who may be first-time participants. Add bios and email contact information for the youth leadership team as well as pictures. (Note: Security is of utmost importance. Never provide contact information of those under 18 years of age. Email addresses should connected to your church’s domain, not personal ones; and telephone numbers must be for the church. Most phone systems can set up multiple voicemail boxes; using this will allow your leaders to check for messages remotely). Encourage the youth already involved in your programs to write for the web-site (final editorial approval rests with you!) This part of your site must be interactive. Your site can contain games and activities that are an extension of their Sunday school or formation program. Again, your young members can be ideal consultants with regard to this. Use this as an opportunity to develop leadership among your teens, while at the same time, inviting more youth into your community. The possibilities are limitless!

Here are some other ideas:

• Everyone likes games and competition! There are many resources for free online games to enhance your site. Answers can be given elsewhere on your site or on Sunday morning.
• Provide online support groups. While there is no replacement for a personal visit, this is a great way to reach the homebound more frequently.
• Match employment seekers with employers in your church with online want-ads.
• Provide pod casts of sermons, sermon summaries or even ideas for preparing for the upcoming week's message.
• Provide email Bible study programs.
• An online "swap-shop" or "for sale/wanted" page.
• Build bridges with other community organizations by exchanging links and banners. Promote each other's upcoming events and services by creating a notice board.
• Finding Your Church, provide a clear map for visitors, one that both locals and those from out-of-town can understand. There are mapping programs that can be downloaded for free if you want to go ‘interactive’ here. Also consider these questions: Is there a parking lot or a nearby public lot first-time visitors should know about? Are you accessible by public transportation? Provide those details as well.
  
• Be sure to include information that will be helpful to those with special needs. Include information about accessibility both inside and outside the church and other facilities. Is there a ramp or an elevator – be sure to identify at which door it is located; are the restrooms accessible; can you accommodate visitors with hearing or visual impairments? Do you have a parish advocate that can assist member with these needs? Provide contact information.

Final Details

Last, but certainly not least, there should be a very easy way for visitors to contact the church with general questions via email or telephone. (And, at the other end, staff should be ready with a friendly, timely reply!)

Structure, Layout and Design Elements

BUT, before you begin to add content to your website there are a few technical issues that need to be covered (we are dealing with computers after all, so we need to get technical!) There are three technical elements to consider with your website: structure, design and layout.

Let’s start with structure. Once your web-site in online, you will want people to find it, therefore, you will need to submit it to search engines and directories (such as Google or Yahoo). Sites without a proper structure or rich content are not usually picked up when a person enters in their search terms. Search engines (e.g. Google) use computer software to “crawl” your site looking for content in the form of key words and links. By doing this, they are able to rank order relevant web-sites related to specific search terms. Therefore, your site should make it easy for this software to analyze your content. Research has shown that a three tier website is most friendly to this software. A three tier website is structured in a way that each of its three levels gets progressively more detailed about the subject matter. Think in terms of this organizational chart.

This structure helps your design progress in a logical fashion so that it is more search-engine friendly as well as easier for your target audience to use. There is no limit to the number of tier two and three pages you can have.

How do visitors read a web page? They generally will start at the top right hand corner and move left and down the left side. So if you have important information our want grab a visitor's attention put it in the left sidebar. A visitor will spend 10 to 12 seconds scanning a web page, if they don't see what they are looking for they will move on.

Layout & Design

The right layout and design increases the likelihood that your site will be included in a directory and that it will be found easily by users. Directories (e.g. Yahoo) use human beings to evaluate site submissions therefore, appearance is important as well as content and structure. If your site looks good to the folks evaluating your site, next they look at the content and structure.

Note:
How do visitors read a web page? They generally will start at the top right hand corner and move left and down the left side. So if you have important information our want grab a visitor's attention put it in the left sidebar. A visitor will spend 10 to 12 seconds scanning a web page, if they don't see what they are looking for they will move on.

Most of your important information should be above the fold (i.e. visible on the screen without much scrolling) on your home page.

Browser compatibility (how your site looks through Internet Explorer compared to Firefox is probably the most frustrating of all issues. If you are not using a site building program it will be difficult to check the appearance of your site in different browser settings. However, you can check your site using different screen resolution settings on your computer, it’s not foolproof, but it will give you a pretty good idea as to what your site will look like in various browsers.

Colors

Your color scheme should be pleasing and restful to the eye. Keep these other factors in mind: watch that your links do not appear to be washed-out in the background color, there should be a good contrast; and, be aware of how this site will appear to someone who is color-blind, or visually impaired in some other way. Avoid color schemes such as red on green and avoid the use of fixed-sized fonts which cannot be increased by the user in the browser view choices.

Conclusion

This can seem like a tall order for a ‘basic’ web-site, but to capture the spiritual imagination of the online community, these are the ‘basics’! A well thought-out plan with an eye toward your ultimate purpose is easier than it may seem. There are many resources available to help you, and designed to fit any budget! You will be positively surprised by the results. Take it one step at a time and before you know it, you will have created a wonderful community faith portal that all members can use to grow in their faith. A congregation that prays together stays together – let today be the day that you board the information super highway to bring the “Good News to the ends of the Earth!!

Contact us to schedule a free, no obligation consultation.