Tips For Improving Your Church Site!
Process for Creating a Church Web Site:
Define
Your Purpose - Inform? Educate? Invite? Interact?
Define Your Audience - Seekers? Members? Visitors?
Assess Your Resources - Volunteers? Trained Staff? Service Providers?
Design Your Site - Original Design? Professional Designs from Service
Providers?
Publish Your Site - Web Host? Service Provider System?
Maintain Your Site - The
most important and largest responsibility!
Quick Tips:
Navigation - Your website needs to be pleasing to the eye at first glance and be easy to navigate. People should not have to think about how to navigate to find certain information when coming to your site for the first time. Every page should be no more than 2 clicks from the front page.
Speed - Your main page should load in less than 8 seconds. On the average, seekers will not wait more than 8 seconds for pictures and content to load before they give up and move on.
Provide Interactivity - Get beyond a static "brochure based" site and provide a way for your visitors to interact. This is especially important for your members. Ministry to your congregation should extend to the web! Provide a means for your members to relate and grow using your church web site. MyFlock.com provides excellent interactivity resources for your site.
Provide a Taste - You should have samples of sermons online, photos of the service, a "what to expect" section, etc. Most seekers want to know before visiting your church whether or not your style and content will meet their spiritual and lifestyle needs.
Don't Go "Over the Top" - Lots of flash is not always what works best. Since half of online users are still on dail-up, Flash introductions tend to take too long to load.
Keep It Current - Dated, current content is vitally important. Never have information that is more than a week old on your main page.
Relevant Content - On your main page, you should have some or all of the following information or a link to reach it quickly:
- Location: directions
- Service times
- Contact info: e-mail / phone / fax etc.
- Personality - information that indicates your church personality: vision, purpose , samples of services etc (see provide a taste above)
Web Site Design Guides
Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton
Approaches web page and site design as "a challenge that combines traditional editorial approaches to documents with graphic design, user interface design, information design, and the technical authoring skills required to optimize the HTML code, graphics, and text within web pages." (from the web site)
Designing Web Usability: Site Design by Jakob Nielsen
A chapter from the book Designing Web Usability. "Look at the Web as you've never seen it before, through the eyes of the average user. Jakob Nielsen, the world's acknowledged authority on Web usability, shares his wisdom and experience on the topic of content, page design, and how to connect with any Web user, in any situation" (from the web site).
Web Page Design for Designers by Joe Gillespie
Articles and resources on typography, graphics, color, navigation, etc. Focuses on the visual design of web pages.
The Foundations of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen
A three-part Web design manifesto based on his book HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites. "He gives advice about navigating the places where art and technology collide, and offers his Ten Commandments of good design (well, OK, there's only three): speed, simplicity, and clarity" (from the web site).
Ten Good Deeds in Web Design by Jakob Nielsen
Nielsen is described as "the guru of Web page usability" by The New York Times. He writes a bi-weekly column on Web usability called Alertbox and is the author of Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity.
How Users Read on the Web by Jakob Nielsen
The Web Developer's Virtual Library
Encyclopedia of Web Design Tutorials, Articles and Discussions