Sometimes I believe that the unbelievable amount of freedom we give to ourselves (and our audiences) is impractical and bloated; in fact, in many cases, it’s far better to limit the amount of options so that we, as the experts in design and web, can craft that unique experience for them.
The homepage of any Church is critical and you begin to craft that experience from click #1.
Today’s Challenge & Inspiration:
I really like the obviously-simple experience of Fav4.org. It’s functionally-limiting but obvious, and it provides some limited customization.
Sometimes I think we need to go all the way back in terms of our thinking and start fresh with our web design methods and strategy.
How can you begin to think differently about your homepage?
You should read “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz.
Behavioral economics about the adverse effects of having too many choices.
The web & ministry applications are endless.
got it on my list.
A great book about simplicity & church is ‘Less Clutter. Less Noise.’ by Kem Meyer, who also has a blog by the same name: http://www.kemmeyer.typepad.com/
yeah, very familiar with kem! she’s great.
ditto, great book and blog.
We are in the middle of redesigning our church site. After meeting with several groups of people in our church we found that a major complaint was that “there was not enough on the current site”. I’m thinking it was just too static of a site and they want more interaction not more choices. Do you think this is a valid conclusion?
really? i’d dig in deeper on those thoughts. it could be a number of different things.
maybe the site wasn’t very good. maybe culturally your website isn’t a big part of your ministry. maybe people are just lazy.
but, when “asked” about a reason of why they don’t use it they blame it on the site and not the many other surrounding issues (or themselves).
take care…!
Hey John, thanks for the advice, I’ll look into that a little deeper and more carefully.
sure thing.
For the last 2 years, the most popular page on our church’s website is the staff page. There is a lot of room for creativity here.
Another popular page is a listing of all the small groups & Bible studies we offer including online signups for each group.
To drive traffic to our website, once a year we have a month long, web-only daily devotionals written by our staff. These are very popular.
wow. i like that.
wow, i like that.
by saying simplicity I think it does not mean “less info” you see so many sites that have so much content that you do not know where to click.. by simplifying the interface you can find ways of still providing boat loads of content… without the ugg monster creeping in..
yes. you win!
Similar experiences with our current church web site. People have also suggested that it didn’t have enough. I have discovered a couple things. 1) creating a simple layout that can easily be navigated 2) being consistent in refering to the web site and pointing people to it. Having church staff being familiar with it, and having buy in to help promote people to visit it.
definitely!
For quite some time I’ve wanted our church to change their site- it’s at least 4 years old. I’ve been told I just want change for the sake of change- and this may be true, but really it’s just that I want to get it over to WordPress!
So I’ve been not liking our site and a major media mogul and mentor to me told me he liked the site. That everyone on his staff likes the site.
I pressed him on this- and he told me it’s because of the simple factor. And I trust his judgement here, because he has literally seen thousands of church websites.
So yeah. Simple. (Is it just me or is this a theme?)
Sweet! that’s awesome! you changing things!
I have my own meaning for the KISS principle: Keep It Surprisingly Simple. The goal is that users should be delighted by an interface’s ease-of-use. Technology-related loyalty is very fickle, so we should go to great lengths to prevent our users from becoming frustrated.
haha. love the “surprise” tag.
On our new website… our homepage will visually represent who we are as a church. The church is a people… so we are going to have images of our worship spaces full of people worshiping. It’s not going to be pictures of our buildings… the church isn’t about the building… it’s about the people.
I agree completely with the simplicity of fav4.org. By going with a cloversite… the communications team and I really feel that we’re moving from a very 1990′s approach to church web design and catapulting forward to a very “ahead of the curve” methodology.
can’t wait to see it!
Got some awesomeness coming in the form of a redesign of my church’s main website soon. Can’t tell you anything more, but it’s gonna be niiiiice on multiple levels.
argh. you slay me with your taunts.