This article is for anyone responsible for a church website. Whether you own the whole thing, are on the committee that oversees it, or you have a voice of influence in this area. Please join me in an exercise that will help make your church website better. Because my guess is that your site is missing one very important thing.
Every church is different so in order for this to be helpful to you specifically, I will need your interactive participation. Jump out of Google Reader for this one. Ready? Let’s go.
The first step is to pull up your church’s website. Go on, this is all skate here. OK, now look at your main page without scrolling or adjusting the screen size, and answer the following questions.
What is the main thing my eyes are drawn to on the page?
What single element captures your attention above everything else? Don’t think too long on this. If you have to spend time deciding, then the answer is “nothing”. Go with your gut.
What did you land on? Your church logo and name? If someone went through the trouble of going to your website they probably already know that much. Was it a large banner image promoting the new message series or maybe some sort of church event? Not bad, not bad. Was it a news feed or maybe a “service times” box? Did anything, in fact, really stick out at all?
Assuming your site had something, ask yourself another question.
Is this what the typical visitor is trying to find?
If you don’t know what the typical user is trying to find on your site then you’re sort of dead in the water already. Please install Google Analytics or, even more appropriately, ChurchAnalytics and learn what your visitors are trying to find.
This will be unique to each church. Some churches have incredible children’s programs. Others may have an amazing singles ministry. Maybe you’re a church that attracts a lot of visitors or you have a sought-after speaker. Know why people are showing up on your site and design it accordingly.
Most of you probably have at least some idea of what they want. If you don’t know, then assume it is one of these.
- Service Times
- Directions
- Phone Number / Email
- Regular Programming Info
- Special Event Info (retreats, camps, community service, special programming)
- Church Summary / Description
This is probably a conversation you need to have among your leadership. If nothing else, it could be a fun experiment to see what they think.
Your Church Site Needs One Thing
The bottom line is that your church needs the most important thing on your main page to stand out. Good web site design dictates that something needs to be elevated above the rest, but most of our church sites are either bland and safe and everything sort of melds together, or they are a hodge-podge of loud, vibrant, obnoxious graphics that compete with each other in a visual shouting match. In the end, nothing wins my attention and my eyes have to swim through a sea of nonsense to find the one thing for which I most likely need.
Look at the following examples and ask yourself, “What do the owners of these sites want me to know? Or do next?”
They were pretty obvious, right?
You can either discover what your visitors want and make it the most obvious thing on the page, or you can choose to guide your visitors to the one thing you want them to see. Either way, having a single thing works.
[image: spiritmama]
Steven says
All good points. Not sure why someone would use ChurchAnalytics though when Google Analytics is available for free?
Chris Ames says
Steven:
Google Analytics is free but as such it is far from comprehensive. You can see the comparison here: http://churchanalytics.com/compare.html
Some of the more notable advantages are that with ChurchAnalytics you get:
– A public URL to the stats so you can fire off a link to the leadership so they can dig around without needing a login.
– Twitter stats
– Video stats
– Alerts
– Detailed info on each visitor
– Real-time stats viewing (you don’t have to wait until tomorrow)
Chris
Trevor says
This info can be used for more than church websites.
Chris Ames says
True!
Eric J says
http://graceinauburn.com/
Anyone want to do a free visitor survey for my church? I know what we want to have stand out but i see our site all day every day so i’m a little biased.
Rodlie says
Thanks for the great reminder. I’m going to try to edit a few things on my church site….
Jeremy says
I’ve been following Church crunch for a bit now and love the content! I am curious though, as this isn’t the first time you guys have talked about analytics and the importance of it – how do you read the analytics page? What should I be looking for / at? I made the jump to churchanalytics when you guys launched it but I’m still scratching my head on how this is suppose to make a difference.
Any help would be great!
Thanks!