"I just wanted to say thanks to you fellas for all you do for us. We count you as partners in our ministry! Your work, professionalism, vision, and talents really are a blessing."—Matt Vanderwarker, Bethel Baptist of Hampton Virginia
It's All About Usability
What do you think makes a website successful? Is it bright colors that appeal to you, flashing slide shows of smiling faces or video footage of all your sermons? We believe the most important criteria in evaluating whether or not a website is successful its usability.
We define Usability as the ease of which a site visitor can find desired information or complete a task. Whether you're evaluating your current website or planning for a new one, it's important to focus on your users from the very beginning. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many times website owners overlook their users by putting bells and whistles before usability. An eye-popping design that causes your users to actively concentrate to find their desired information is, in our opinion, less successful than a plainer design that gets right to the point.
But the choice between great design and usability is not an either/or decision. It should be your goal to have a site that not only makes key information easy to find, but gives the user a pleasant time finding it.
Let's consider three broad categories of users who could potentially visit your site:
- The Unbeliever—who knows nothing about your church and is exploring to learn more
- The Possible Future Member—a believer, who is looking for a church of like faith with which to identify
- The Current Church Member—who is coming to the site seeking specific information
An effective user-centered site design anticipates the motives of each of these three types of users and makes it easy for each one to find what he or she is looking for. Let's begin our discussion about usability by evaluating the most important page of your site.
The Home Page—Built for Usability
Your home page (the first page of any site that is displayed after entering its address in a browser) delivers an immediate first impression of your ministry to your users. A few seconds after they arrive, they have formed a mental picture about your church as either up-to-date or out-of-date, friendly or impersonal, traditional or contemporary.
Designing a successful home page can be very challenging, because you must communicate the most important and popular areas of your site to your users without creating an overcrowded, confusing mess. Here are few home page tips that will immediately make your site more usable and improve your users' perception of your ministry.
Home Page Do's
- Keep it simple. The home page should have a pleasing, uncluttered look. Refine your text. Keep it to a minimum, and only use imagery of an outstanding quality.
- Make your contact information easily accessible, so that your users can e-mail you or find your phone number should they wish to call. Also, make your address, driving directions and a local area map showing your exact location also readily available.
- Clearly display the main navigation. Your users won't stay on the home page for long. The main navigation is likely where they will go next.
- Carefully evaluate the content of your home page, and leave out all but the most important information. If the content does not help one of the three types of users previously discussed, don't crowd your page with it.
- Keep your content fresh and current as much as possible. Not only will this encourage repeat site visits, but it will also give search engines something new to read.
Home Page Dont's
- Avoid distracting users with complicated animation or delaying them with a mandatory splash screen. People are impatient and expect to get to the heart of your content as quickly as possible.
- Never use blinking or scrolling text. Text that travels from side to side or top to bottom (also known as a marquee) was an interesting trick ten years ago. Now it is an outdated cliche that no one appreciates and many find frustrating.
- Avoid animated clip art—even if it was free. Spinning crosses, animated icons and the like are about as annoying as cell phones ringing during the invitation. Don't use them.
- Say No to busy background patterns and textures. You worked hard to get rid of the old wallpaper in the bathroom. Don't let it stay on your website.
- Don't startle your users with video, music or sound effects. Songs that start playing or welcome messages that blare out automatically are not welcome by site visitors. If you have a well-produced welcome video that your users would benefit from watching, let them initiate contact by first clicking on an icon to play it.
- Summarize large blocks of text into smaller ones. People don't read websites, they browse them. It is certain that your ten-paragraph-long welcome letter will not be read. Use the space more profitably.
- Never let your home page have horizontal scroll bars. Ideally your site should always fit comfortably from left to right without the need to scroll. Most users will scroll vertically to access material on the bottom of the site, but your most important content should probably be accessible without scrolling.
- Don't use excessively large images that would cause the page to load slowly. Web visitors are an impatient sort. If your website is not loading quickly, some users may not wait for it, others may develop a bad impression of it. Test your site load time. If it takes longer than a few seconds, it probably needs some work.
- Avoid posting out-dated events, articles or sermons that make it appear as if you haven't updated your site in quite some time.
- Don't display hit counters. Although we encourage you to monitor your site statistics, use a service that allows you to collect this information with hidden stat counters. The days of seeing "You are visitor number 74,933" are long gone. (We recommend using Google Analytics if you're looking for an excellent free stats package.)
Beyond the Home Page
Following a few online conventions will help improve your users' experience as they navigate the other pages of your site.
- The site navigation needs to be consistently displayed, logically organized and easy to access so that your users know where they are now, where they came from and where they will go next. Your users should be able to find what they are looking for with a minimum of mouse clicks and should not have to pour through text-laden pages to find specific data.
- Use 10 or fewer top level links in your main navigation. If your site has more than 10 pages, group them into sections, or your navigation will quickly become overwhelming.
- Include a site map link on every page that displays the complete content of your site at a glance.
- If your site is growing rapidly, include a search box (the top right of the page is the most common place users look for a search box) that will display a list of all pages of the site related to any key word entered into it.
Beyond the basic informational pages, there are several features you can include on your website that will enhance its effectiveness. Here are some that we have found many users appreciate:
Visitors' Center
One of the most effective ways to reach those who have never before visited your church is to have a dominant link on the home page to a Visitors' Center page. Put curious future visitors at ease by answering frequently asked questions such as: When are the services? What are the services like? Where do we go when we arrive? What do I wear to church? What activities are there for my children?
News and Events
Provide juicy descriptions and details about your special meetings. Members need to be reminded about them, and there's no faster way of connecting them to up-to-date information than your website.
Photo Gallery
A photo gallery of church activities will not only excite your members but also give those unacquainted with your ministry a positive feel for your congregation. If you have a photo gallery, resist the urge to post every photo you take online. Put your best foot forward by selecting only the finest ones for the site; five good photos are better than twenty mediocre ones. Emphasize close-ups of faces and group events. If you choose to include photos of your facilities, make sure those photos are flattering. A word of caution—we recommend ensuring that you have your members' permission before posting their photos online. We have made a permission form available for download here.
Links Page
A page dedicated to linking to other websites of organizations with which your church identifies is useful in many ways. Church members may find the links helpful, visitors can associate your ministry with other organizations with which they may be familiar, and search engines will better understand the content of your site by the other sites to which you link. (We will explain more about search engine ranking later in this book.) Potential links can include Christian colleges, mission agencies, Bible search sites, individual missionary pages, etc.
Church Directory
Most churches wrestle with keeping their printed church directory up-to-date. Why not consider making it an online resource where members can manage their own addresses, phone numbers or even pictures? The directory should not be accessible to anyone. By safeguarding it with a password, you can ensure that only church members can access it.
Opt-in E-mail Newsletter
Personal websites, blogs, and instant messaging are currently very popular, but tried and true e-mail communication is still alive and well. You could use e-mail newsletters to communicate with members in specific church ministries (like choirs or youth workers) or to all your members, promoting special announcements, prayer requests and the like. You may find it a helpful tool to make your e-mail newsletter available to everyone, members and non-members, by placing a link on your site for users to join your e-mail list. If you do, be sure to respect your users privacy by giving them the option to remove themselves from the list in the future. Even if you don't have this functionality built into your site, there are several online services you can use to manage a mass e-mail list.
Staff Page
A page detailing the contacts for various church ministries (including their e-mail address) can make your communication very efficient. Use caution, however. If you post an e-mail address online, it will eventually become harvested by malicious software and receive unsolicited messages (or spam). In order to protect your e-mail accounts from being spammed, it is important that any e-mail address on your website be encrypted in such a way that it is not collectable for spamming. You can also use an online form to send contact messages from your site without posting any e-mail address at all. View an example here.
Helpful Documents
There are plenty of documents that a ministry can make available on their website to help their users learn more about them. Some examples include Doctrinal Statements, School Handbooks, Sunday School Policies, etc. All of these can be posted on your site and made available for download.
E-commerce and Online Event Registration
Instead of requiring parents to manually fill out tedious forms to enroll their children for camp, why not allow them to register online and pay conveniently with a credit card? Many churches also offer online resources like books, sermon recordings, and cd's for sale on their site.
In the next article in this series, we'll discuss how to start your own church website project.