Designing Your Website

Website Planning: Tips for Building a Better Church Site

Building a website for your church can be a great idea.  It can be a great way to introduce potential new members to your church and its community.

It can also be a good way to keep current members up to date on recent news and events and provide a place for them to interact.  Designing an effective website is relatively easy but there are a few things which you should keep in mind.

These simple tips can help you create a beautiful, functional and popular website for your church.

Tip #1 – Make it Dynamic

Many different churches have a website.  The problem is that many of these websites are rather boring and consist of little more than one page.  While it’s important to provide contact information, the location of your church and the schedule for its services, you should try to design a site that is actually interesting and interactive.  It doesn’t need to be huge but you should have more than a few pages.  Try to come up with a number of different topics and include these in their own page on your site.

Tip #2 – Have it Reflect your Church

If you’re designing a website for a church, you should make sure to include plenty of real graphics, photos and videos.  One mistake which many people make is that they use generic stock photos on their church’s site.  The problem with this is that it doesn’t truly reflect the church or its congregation.  Make sure to take plenty of photos which show off the beauty of the church and the diversity of its members.  Post pictures from past functions, take video footage of actual services and post them on your site.  This will give new members a better feeling for your church and can help motivate them to visit.

Tip #3 – Make it Easy to Navigate

Since your church site is going to have more than a few pages and include quite a bit of graphics and videos, it’s important to make it easy to navigate.  It can be a good idea to have plenty of great links right on the homepage of the church site.  These links should help visitors find certain pages and specific information.  Navigation is easily one of the most important elements in any website design so keep this in mind while you create it.  If a church website is hard to navigate, and visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, they will be less inclined to actually visit the church.

Quick Take-A-Ways

Your church site needs to be as active and dynamic as your church itself.  Include plenty of real pictures and videos of your church, its members and its services.  You should also make sure that the site is easy to navigate.  Following these few simple steps will allow you to create a wonderful, entertaining and immersive website for your church.

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