Make Your Church Web Site Work For You

Is your church’s web site working or is it something that was created out of the best of intentions, but now seems out-of-date and ineffective?

Is it...boring?

As much as you might like to believe in the “if you build it, they will come” approach, that simply doesn’t work. It ignores human nature and it ignores everything we’ve learned about the internet in the years since it stopped being a novelty and became an integral part of our lives.

If your church has a web site that resembles a stale, online brochure long past its prime, it may be time for an overhaul. Here are some suggestions to help make version 2.0 of the site much more appealing and engaging…a site that actually will do the work it was intended to do.

A modern web site is not an online brochure. It needs to be just as easy for you to use as for the people that visit it.

You can spend thousands on a professionally-designed web site if you want, but if you don’t know what to ask for, you may end up with another brochure-style site—albeit an expensive one.

Instead, consider installing a site based on WordPress—a free blogging platform. Many churches, universities, companies and countless individuals use it. You might be scared off by the word “blogging”, but don’t be. Blogging is in WordPress’ lineage, but it’s no longer limited to just that. WordPress provides you the flexibility to easily post new content to the site, which makes it simple for you to use, even without a technical background.

I’ve seen church web sites that started strong but then fizzled out. Often the symptom of this is terribly out-of-date content. I’ve seen five-year old newsletters, out-of-date directions to the church, and so on. The reason? The people responsible for the site now don’t know how to use it. It was probably set up by a well-meaning volunteer or staff person who has since left. As long as that person was around, the site was up-to-date. When the person left, the site became unusable.

WordPress has a very short learning curve, so you no longer need to be concerned about this if you choose this as your solution.

Whether you want your new site to appeal to people in your church or to people outside (in the hopes they’ll want to learn more), the site should be attractive.

We all can spot bad design.

Great-looking web sites are so easy to create these days that unattractive ones stand out like a sore thumb.

Let’s face it, people aren’t going to stick around a web site if awful colors or bad design are so distracting that it’s difficult to read what’s on the page.

Invest the effort in making it attractive and uncluttered. Fortunately, WordPress is outstanding at this.

Don’t forget to use photos, graphics, video throughout the site to make it more visually appealing. Be careful not to let it obstruct your message but instead enhance it.

Organize the content on your site according to what visitors (whoever they may be) will have on their minds.

Make important information easy to find. Worship times, directions, event and contact information should jump out to the reader.

Does anybody really care about boards and committees? Visitors are much more likely to be interested learning something specific, discovering something about the church, or accomplishing some task.

In other words, figure out what visitors want when they come to the site and make it absolutely simple for them to find it. Look at your church through their eyes instead of yours. Visitors don’t care about committees or mission statements.

Don’t bury the exciting things going on in your church.

Too many churches put their newsletters online, but only as a PDF file. This requires a visitor to find the newsletters area, open or download a file before they can read what they came to find out. It’s fine to offer the PDF file for convenience, but take the time to extract the information and post it separately.

Don’t let your church’s web site become stale. Don’t let it become an online brochure that never changes.

Unless your approach to a web site is that new information will be regularly posted, once someone has visited it, they’ll have little reason to ever come back again.

In other words, make people want to visit again.

This is where the strength of a blogging platform such as WordPress really shines. Aside from being trivial to post new content, the content will be automatically organized by the date it was posted (keeping the latest information where it’s most likely to be seen).

It’s up to you whether to post daily, once or twice a week, or once or twice a month.

But the harder you work to make the site interesting, relevant and timely, the more power your site has to draw people in and the better it will work for you.

Fail to do this and you’ll end up with a boring site that no one visits.

Especially when the material is directed toward those outside the church, focus on the visitor’s point of view. Even when the material is for the benefit of your church family, reader-focused material is what will make the site interesting and make a repeat visit more likely.

Posting committee meeting minutes will put almost everyone to sleep. Instead, take the time to write something about a key decision that was made and how it will affect the church.

If writing for readers outside the church, write something that will make a potential visitor want to check out your church. Write something about the relationship between your church and the community or something that relates your church’s beliefs or point of view to what’s going on in the world or community. Simply writing “here we are, come check us out” isn’t likely to have much of an effect.

If people don’t know your site exists, how can they check it out?

You should consider two activities to help people discover the site: promote it and make it friendly to search engines.

Promote it online and offline.

You may feel more comfortable promoting it offline by mentioning it in and around the church, verbally, in print, on bulletins boards and external signage.

But it’s also most helpful to use the internet. Take the time to list your church in online directories, to use social bookmarking tools (such as Digg or Delicious) and to use social media. Spend time getting the site as well as individual pieces of content mentioned and promoted on Facebook (as an example). Build out a network of connections, first with your church’s own people that can help spread the material by reading it, commenting on it and sharing it.

Make the site friendly to search engines such as Google Search by incorporating into your site the words, terms and phrases (all known as keywords) that people might use when looking for a church (or your church). Use those keywords in your content, in headlines, and descriptions.

Keep your eyes open and observe what others are doing. Spend some time checking out other church’s web sites. Be observant. Learn from them. Even call up a church or two to ask questions about how they accomplished something on their site or how effective it’s been.

Keep your eyes open for ideas and techniques that would make sense for your church to try.

There’s no reason for your church to have to reinvent the wheel.

The important thing to remember is that you no longer need to be stuck with an outdated, static web site that doesn't work for your church.