Two ideas about who your church website is for:

1) A Billboard for Visitors on the Information Superhighway
2) A Community Center for the Congregation

1.   A BILLBOARD designed website is the way most church websites are today. They shout “here we are, contact us,” or “here is our worship schedule.” Or “here’s what our pastor looks like.” This is the easiest type of church website to create. Designed as a billboard on the information superhighway, such a website usually attracts those who zoom by it once, or those “have to” go there for some reason. Done right, it can service interested visitors and members who like to be on the web. But that will be a small percentage of those who actually visit your church.  And because your statistics will be poor, interest in your website project will wane. Then it will grow stale, and die.

Designing that Billboard for Visitors
The literature about attracting church members strongly suggests that visitors are “trying on” your church like a suit of clothes when they visit. They are trying to see if they fit in. They try to imagine themselves being there. They look around at the people and activities to get a sense of “if” they would like to hang out with this group. They want to know what the worship service is like. And they definitely want to get a sense about the pastor –is he or she a wet blanket, or someone they would like to get to know.  It is your PHOTOS that will tell them a lot about your church.

2.    A Community Center designed website gives church members ways to connect to each other. It is designed to promote fellowship and sharing. It is a virtual meeting place where relationships can grow. Billboard websites “announce.”  Community-like church websites facilitate the flow of timely information, promote discussion, involve people in study, and allow them to respond.

One great way to promote community and invite people to contribute content is to create a MESSAGE BOARD at your church’s website. They’re free to install, and easy to manage. If you don’t visit message boards, don’t assume the next 10 people you meet don’t either!  Your members are consulting message boards for health & travel information. Your sports-nuts visit team message boards. Your teens and college students belong to myspace and facebook -which are essentially glorified message boards. People come for the info, and return for the community.

Board over Blog…
I see quite a few church sites with “Blogs” (like this one) popping up. Typically they are “Pastor Blogs” …weekly observations which people can respond to in a limited fashion. A message board can do the same thing but with FAR MORE OPTIONS to let OTHER people in your congregation speak.  You can set up a Topic in a message board titled “The Pastor’s Blog.” Same thing.

HOT TIP OF THE CENTURY: What do people love to see?  Themselves! They love photos from past events. They love to see photos of the kids, the picnics, the groups, the retreats, the worship service. If your church website doesn’t have a regular flow of fun photos, it will likely not get a regular flow of member visits. You can post pictures on regular webpages, or you can post them in a forum on your message board.

 

Lessons from Real Experience

I have created six different websites and consulted on several more. Each has taught me something about website management, design and usability. I’ve worked on sites and let others take them over too. You can learn a lot about church’s and websites when YOU are no longer driving them. There’s no experience like real experience.

I have concluded three important things about building a church website. These observations are based on having rebuilt my own former church’s website TWICE, trained staff and volunteers to update it portions of it, watched the statistics closely (real stats provided by the server, not those hokey “749 visitors since 1903″ counters), and then watched what happened to the site AFTER I was no longer at the church:

1) “What a church or staff says it wants, isn’t necessarily what it will support or use.”

2) A Modest but well-done website can attract a surprising number of visitors

3) After you’re gone, if the staff didn’t really care about it, it can become a wasteland faster than you can say “Death Valley.”

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