Building a Welcoming Website for Your Church

Paul Tukey

Communication Assessment & Strategy Committee

NJ Association of the UCC

Oct 16, 2004

Slides posted at: www.nja-ucc.org

Reasons for having a website

Who will it serve? Target audiences? Members – it’s a communication medium Local community Prospective new members Visitors from “across cyberspace”

Your design & content must serve all these simultaneously, with suitable balance

Advance preparationThink hard about what makes your church unique Why would people come to your church instead of

others in town? What message do you want to communicate to

prospective new members? Review brochures and mission statements already

developed for other purposes. Draw as many as possible into this conversation. Try to articulate your unique qualities.

Advance Preparation (cont’d)

What kinds of people visit websites to find churches to attend? What would they be looking for?

E.g. Many young families look for churches with vibrant Sunday School programs

If your church has those qualities, let them know!

The key question: Would a person visiting your website think to themselves “Now that’s a church that I’d feel comfortable in!”

Where to find inspiration (cont’d)

Look critically at many church websites Which ones would appeal to people you want to

attract? Think about why they do or don’t work well

Look at websites of neighboring churches(the “competition”!)

Look at your favorite non-church websites, for usable design element Constantly collect links to “cool” websites

The Bigger Picture

Your website is only one of many forms of communicationAim for a website design that visually links up with your newsletter, bulletins, print ads, brochures, local TV ads, press releases, etc To achieve “brand recognition”

Use denomination design elements, for the same reason – e.g. God is Still SpeakingPost newsletters, etc., at your website

Who will design your website?

See if any members have the required skills Graphical design + website design + advertising

+ writing

Possibly, hire a web-design consultant This will be expensive! Especially one who has built church websites Look carefully at their portfolio

If not, try “copying” the design of some website you like – modifying to taste

Some Good Design Principles

Pleasing, inviting color scheme

Simple, clear organization of content

Easy navigation

Consistent look-and-feel across website

Uncluttered

Balance between text & graphics

Minimum dependence on scrolling

Some Pitfalls

Stale content

People promise to help but don’t show up Have contingency plans for this

Loss of interest It’s more fun to create it than to maintain it! Plan for the long haul

Students as website builders / maintainers They graduate and leave

Some Pitfalls (cont’d)

Poor design Inconsistency, excessive glitz, confusing

navigation

Being too ambitious Creating more content than anyone wants to

maintain Creating a design that makes content posting

difficult

Stale content

Getting Visitors

How will anyone find your website?Make sure it gets indexed by Google, etc Make sure all important keywords are present Don’t let Google searches trap people in subpages

Get Google to show your website in the first page of hits, for reasonable search stringsGet lots of other websites to link to yours!Publish your web address widely – print ads, signs outside church, business cards, stationary, Yellow Pages, telephone answering message, email signatures …

Let’s look at some websites

Websites to visit, walk thru, critique: All NJA UCC churches with websites Other church websites in/near Summit

(“my competition”) A few others

NOTE: These slides will be posted atwww.nja-ucc.org