Designing a Church Website

Marcus Orr on June 5th, 2008

Web is an appropriate word for the internet. I feel like I’ve been caught in a web the last couple of weeks as my time has been consumed with a redesign of our church website, AlamanceLife.com and the launch of my own website, MarcusOrr.com. Thankfully, I’ve been able to find some useful online resources that have been tremendously helpful in making the task a little easier. I’d like to share some helpful tips that I’ve picked up while designing my sites. I’ve broken them down into what I believe are three critical elements to building an effective church website: Purpose, Content and Design.

Purpose

Who is your website for? Is it to attract visitors or is it for communicating with members? Most of the folks I hear from want a church website to provide information about the church to members of the community who might be potential visitors. Yet, the content and design of many church websites doesn’t reflect this purpose. I’m getting a little ahead of myself, we’ll address content and design in a moment. You have to decide what the primary purpose of the website is before moving on to the content and design stage. I personally believe that evangelism should be a primary purpose of having a church website. You need to bookmark the Online Web Evangelism Guide by Brigada. This is one of the best online resources I’ve found for planning and developing a Christian website, or any website for that matter. They have a tremendous amount of material to help guide you through building your site.

Content

Once you’ve decided who your audience is, you need to figure out what to say. There are four main items that you’ll definitely want to address: Who, Why, Where and When. Who are you? Tell a bit about your church. Your main pages aren’t the place to post your doctrinal statement, constitution, bylaws, articles of incorporation or any other important statements of the church. You can certainly include those somewhere on the site if you’d like, but let the truly interested dig for them. The church history shouldn’t be front and center either. All of those things contribute to who your church is, they don’t describe who the church is. Your content introducing the church should emphasis who you are as a community of believers. Your content should also begin to answer the question, “Why should I come?” Many people are now turning to the internet when seeking a prospective church family. If your content can’t keep an internet visitor for more than a few seconds, chances are good that they will never grace even the front steps of the church either. Give the reader reasons to become interested in learning more about the church in person. There are some great ides for creatively writing about your church over at the blog Church Marketing Sucks that are worth checking out. As noted above, if someone’s looking at your site, they may be considering visiting. If they can’t easily find the times and locations for your services, they’ll look elsewhere. GoogleMaps and Mapquest both offer code that you can insert into your website to generate maps for folks to find you. Even if you don’t insert a map function into the site, at least clearly provide the address and contact information. I like to include this information in the footer of each page when possible. Keep your content updated. It won’t entice anyone to visit your church if you’re advertising last year’s Christmas Program. A final word about content before we move on to design. Too many sites are built with the presupposition that the viewer is rooted in Christian tradition. They use words, phrases and imagery which might not be understood by an increasingly diverse, non-Christian culture. Practice explaining your church and faith without using Christian jargon and you’ll be well on your way to effectively communicating Christ to the culture.

Design

Ok, so you’ve got the purpose of your site figured out and you know the content of what you want to say. You’re ready to get started building your site! It is a tedious process getting everything designed just the way you want it in a way that’s easy to maintain, especially if you don’t have much experience with web design. Fortunately, there are free tools and websites that can guide novice designers through the process. In the past, I have used Microsoft Frontpage and Macromedia Dreamweaver to build sites. Dreamweaver is a great package with tons of features for advanced users. I’m moving away from these. Instead, I’m using Wordpress to manage this site and AlamanceLife. Wordpress is easy to use, manages the content well, supports multiple users, has a large support base, and thousands of free, professional looking themes available. I recommend www.GoDaddy.com for domain registration and web hosting, I’ve used them for all of the sites I’ve built. Wordpress also installs easily and seamlessly from the GoDaddy account manager. For more on using WordPress for your church website, check out these links:


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