Congratulations, your church has a new website. Now what? How are you using it? How is it serving your ministry and staff? What is it doing to communicate with your community and target audience?
If this is the first time you have been asked these questions, then you need to read keep reading. Chances are, you or your boss decided one day that the church needed a “cooler website like So and So Community Church down the street,” and so you got one. There was no strategy, process, or goal setting to begin with and now you are left asking some important STEP 1 questions while you are sitting at STEP 50. It’s ok, it happens to the best of us.
Yesterday, my son spent hours building a big Lego firetruck for his younger brother. The final step called for the wheels to be placed on the chassis but much to my boy’s frustration, the wheels didn’t fit. After reviewing the plans for him, I informed him that he made a critical mistake on page 2 by leaving out a piece that allowed the wheels to fit. He stomped, punched his fist into the couch but then we came up with a solution that allowed us to fix the problem without starting from scratch. Simple.
That is what this article is for your website. The list below are staples of every church website: must-haves and requirements for an effective web strategy in 2010. If you are missing one or all of them, don’t panic, many can be added with relative ease. However, this may also be a good time re-evaluate your web and communication priorities. You might just conclude that starting from scratch is what the doctor ordered.
1. I’m New Here
A visitor to your site will immediately start looking for this button/link upon arrival. If they are not, they will subliminally click it anyways because afterall, they ARE new. The I’m New Here (or whatever you want to call it) section is your church’s infomercial for the newcomer. It should include the vitals that any new family will want to know: service times, children’s programming info, environment, what to expect, a campus map, etc. The info here should be short and sweet but effective in painting your church with a broad brush. A few good examples of this are here, here, and here.
Having a great I’m New Here section is not enough either, it must be easy to find. Many churches have the page, but it is buried in the site’s navigation or it just doesn’t pop. Several church sites run scripts in the landing pages that detect whether or not the visitor to the site is a first-time hit or not. The script then uses this info to decide which content to dynamically pull. Effectively, visitors to the site will automatically see the I’m New Here info and returning guests on the site will see other featured content. Very Big Brother, but very effective.
2. Fresh Content
There are many examples of this in the church web site world right now. Most updated web strategies will feature fresh content such as rotating announcement graphics or current message series art. There is a reason why this is so popular: it is a necessity. A stale, static, out-of-date website actually communicates negatively for your church, it might just be better to have nothing than a site that says, “We haven’t updated this website since July of 2007 because we all drank some bad Kool-Aid and there is no one left to update it.”
It does not take much to add fresh, rotating art to the front of your site. Yes, you can be more elaborate than others, but the technology itself is relatively cheap and easy to manage. Another easy option for keeping the site content fresh is a blog. If your CMS or site supports it, try installing WordPress or another custom blog option as an quick-fix.
3. Word-of-Mouth Assistance
It is no secret that the Holy Grail of advertising and marketing is word-of-mouth. Major corporations spend millions each year on trying to control it and churches miss many opportunities to do so each week. Your website can function as a catalyst for people talking about your church if you let it and in the age of communication we currently live in, it is a necessity to do so. As your community and visitors visit your site, they should be given the option to share the information or subscribe in several ways to updated content. A few examples of this are invite-a-friend scripts, Twitter/Facebook links, text message subscribe, and RSS. The best church websites are the ones that give the user the option to share and/or follow on every page.
Adding this functionality can be easy or hard, it all depends on how much time you are willing to put into it. An easy option is using AddThis badges on your site. There are several self-install options out there, but going forward this may be your best investment and good place to call a designer or rebuild around social media.
4. Contact Info
This is much like the I’m New Here section in that having it is not enough, it needs to be easy to find. People have questions before they come and many like to call and email first. At the very least, many people use the familiarity of the Contact Us link to find the address and map to your campus. Every website has a contact us section because it is smart to do so and after years of developing a web culture around next steps, to not have one will confuse the visitor. Your contact page should have a form that users can email the office, an address with a link to mapped directions, and the vital info (phone, email, fax, etc). Most of the time, the contact page is in the top 3 of visited pages on a site.
5. Personality
I used to think I was weird and then I realized how much closer to normal I am than I thought. I judge a church by its website. It is not right, but many times I will decide whether or not I like an organization based on its site. Just as often, I will find that a church does not match the personality that it’s website puts off. When you are building your web site and evaluating your strategy, make sure you are capturing the character of your church with it. I know it sounds vague, but only you know what that means exactly. Generally speaking, avoid stock photography and pre-packaged content when possible. Ask volunteers to write for the site and use pics from your community on the site when possible. This will help your church body identify with the site and use it more often and it will paint an honest picture of who you are for guests.
Hope this helps. Depending on your budget, there are unlimited resources out there for you to use when putting the must-haves on your site. Stc is a good place to start as well as Google. Check out our sponsors to the left if you need to find a vendor to help you out.
