The church website is as invaluable as the congregation that attends the church itself. Does your church have a website?
Your church website is one of the first impressions that your church will leave with any new visitors interested in joining. With that, you want your first impression to be a strong one.
Here are 5 tips and places of improvement we at Plum have noticed about church websites.
1. Schedule! Schedule! Schedule!
Every church website needs to have a schedule of all events, mass, food drives, and all goings on at the church. Having a set of clearly defined hours, events, and the like is the easiest way to improve your website and help visitors to the site and church.
The first thing a website provides is information. Sometimes more, and sometimes less, but any which way you cut it a website must give some information to its visitors: times, dates, hours of operation, anything.
2. Accessible and Mobile Friendly
Today people are on their phones too often, but that means they’re also likely to check out your website on their phone first. Especially if they’re on the go, maybe they need to check what time an event starts or when mass begins.
It’s not just young attendees either, everyone has a mobile device, either a smartphone, a tablet, whatever. Most people might not want to admit how often they use their phones they do.
3. Think About Your Audience
The first impression has changed, today it starts by googling and looking up a restaurant or store or church before checking it out in person. A firm handshake and a warm smile aren’t enough anymore, a website gives a sense of legitimacy and security. You have to think about your audience and their experience visiting your site.
Visitors will see your website and form an opinion of the site and your church before ever coming by in person. You have to ask yourself: How do you want people to feel? Once you have that answer, tailor your church’s website to express that.
Make sure your copy expresses it. Your images give it off. Everything matters in tailoring your message.
4. Simplicity is Always Preferred
In web design, as in most things, simple is always good. It’s not for every website or industry. In general, keeping things straight forward and will not only help you in managing the site, but it will help visitors in navigating the site.
A single page website is the epitome of simple, a long form site that scrolls and is ideal for images and minimal copy. On the other hand, a larger multi-page site is perfect for anyone with a lot of information to provide. Letting you write as much as you want and let you organize every page to do what you want.
Regardless of which direction you choose to go with your site you want to make sure it fits you the best and that you’re straight forward with your information for your visitors.
5. Functional and Optimized
After info and design your website needs to actually work. As long as the links are functional and it loads up for whomever is visiting and viewing the site you’re in the clear.
Form and function are key, but they mean nothing if you aren’t SEO ready. Search Engine Optimized, basically it means that if someone is searching on the web, your site is more or less likely to pop up for them depending on what they type into the search field.
At Plum, we take a personal approach with all of our clients, we want to listen to your story, and what makes you, you. We connect with our clients on a personal and professional level, something that we find always provides a better outcome for everyone involved. Give us a call at 800-992-9663. Tell us your story, and we can help tell it.
