With the ever continuing growth of the Internet and tools available to create an amazing church website, we are going to take look at what you should know before taking on the project.
We’ve all see those awe inspiring church websites online that just take your breath away from the time you land on their homepage.
Furthermore, you begin to realize how quickly you can become absolutely overwhelmed with the vast amount of content and trying to find your way around.
While there are several companies and tools available to lead you to what you want for your church website design, it’s important to realize that not all of them are created equal.
Since I am a WordPress advocate, that is my preferred choice in creating the ultimate online presence for any church website design.
Notice that I linked to the WordPress foundation website and not the dot com version. Let me dive in a help separate the difference between them.
WordPress is an opensource platform. In short this means that you are free to download and develop it to your personal liking an needs.
By using the Dot com version, you are limited to what types of themes and little if any plugins to assist in developing your envisioned church website design.
Absolutely there are. However, you want to compare costs over the long-range of things, not just the short interim.
Let’s use Square Space as an example. Let me be very clear up front. They don’t provide you with an associated costs up front.
However, once you dive in, you can quickly find yourself paying as much as $75 per month depending upon the size of your church and the specific needs you may need to have operational on your website.
Such things as online giving solutions, built-in blogging capabilities, media hosting, etc.
As you begin to realize everything you need, this can begin to add up very quickly.
So, over a ten year period at $75 per month, you will have spent a grand total of $9,000.
Here’s where WordPress and your own hosting account can save you thousands of dollars over the typical providers that many of you have probably seen on your Facebook feeds.
So let’s say you have a website that attracts a lot of visitor’s and your regular congregants.
Our mid-grade hosting runs $150.00 annually, and then a recommended maintenance plan, which runs $75 per month. You are now saying, “but that is the same amount of money over the same time frame.” You would be correct, however, let’s look at what it will save you.
The first option of using someone like SquareSpace, you are completely on your own.
They are not going to develop your site for you nor perform regular updates and additions as you may require without a fair amount of money out-of-pocket.
You can find plenty of other options by searching Google, if you haven’t already, who provide a myriad of services that are closely related.
Again, it’s going to be based on your church size and the exact requirements that you need to implement on your website.
Certainly another item to keep in consideration is “how mobile friendly” is your church website according to Google’s new standards for mobile web optimization.
And yes it matters if you are looking to capture those around your community that you are looking to attract to engage and visit with you.
I’m just going to be as straight forward as I possibly can. Regardless of your platform, unless you decide to hire a developer, you can plan on rolling up your sleeves and attending YouTube University to learn as much as you can.
Moving forward, WordPress installed onto your own hosting account opens thousands of doors of opportunities in how creative you can be with your website.
Let’s face it, everyone at one point in time or another has thought of what it would be like to have their very own online community such as Facebook or Twitter.
You would have to be almost out of your mind not to have.
Another point, for all the pastors out there right now who are hating on Facebook or Twitter, you might as well come to realize that they are the fastest way to interact with the unchurched.
If you’re still relying on old school methods of trying to make contact, you might as well go right ahead and close your doors now.
Bear in mind that the online presence you create, depends upon the crowd you will attract. Isn’t it each of our jobs to go out into the world and make fisher’s of men? I’m pretty sure I read that in the Bible.
How about online giving, children check-in (extremely popular), keeping track of regular attendees as well as your visitors, promoting your upcoming events, and proving a way for people to interact with you on a personal level.
It’s a true win win situation if done properly.
Now let’s talk about a few of the things that should be at the very top of your list when beginning to either create your online presence, or even if you need to make some changes to an existing church website design.
Ease-of-use is going to come in at the very top of the list. A church website that is difficult to navigate will drive away your visitors just as quickly as they come to find you.
Don’t try and hide things that require a ton of links to be able to get to it. Speaking of links, don’t try and cram everything into your primary navigation system.
The easiest way to think of it is, just like you were mapping out a family vacation you were planning on driving.
What’s the old saying “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.”
It certainly applies when beginning to design and layout the map for your website.
Break it down contextually. I have seen church website’s that have 20 various categories of ministries they have within the organization.
There is certainly no need to put them all in the header of your website menu.
Break them down by types and create separate navigations systems with the appropriate links for each of the pages they will appear on.
Trust me, when you begin to map this out logically, the visitor’s to your website will greatly appreciate the time and effort that you have taken to make their visit both smooth and easy-to-use.
Having worked with many churches, when it comes to imagery, this is where the struggle starts to get real.
I get that maybe you don’t have the ideal group of people or images that you have envisioned to put onto your website, however, the overuse of stock photography can easily be picked out.
You want to utilize stock photography sparingly.
People want to see real faces. When they finally decide to visit you in person, they want to be able to look and say “hey, I recognize that person from your website.” It goes a long way in providing credibility.
The other critical area to keep in mind when it comes to images, is their actual size.
Too many times I have been handed over a church website design project, went into their medial library, only to find images that were over 200 MB in size. Talk about making your website drag.
It’s important to keep in mind, that not everyone with a cellphone has access to or is on a 5G network, thus when it comes time to load your site, they probably could make a trip to the convenience store quicker than your site will load.
Image optimization ABSOLUTELY HAS to be at the very forefront of your mind when it comes to creating a quick loading website.
PhotoShop is my ultimate turn-to tool for optimizing any images that I will be using on a web design project. For those who don’t have PS, don’t worry. There is a FREE online version called Photopea.
With WordPress now supporting WebP image formats, there is a FREE online tool that you can convert your jpg’s into the WebP format. It is Squoosh.
You can typically take a file down to around 50kb, which assist in your images loading quickly without placing a strain of either your visitor’s device or your web server (hosting company.)
Further more, you will want to utilize a CDN after your site is completed to further assist in providing you with the ultimate in page speed optimization and deliverability.
Of course, that is included FREE with all of our hosting packages.
Several years ago, it almost was a necessity for a church to have their own online app.
It made connecting with new people a little easier, especially when it come to online giving and dontations.
However, with mobile responsiveness almost being native in any website build using WordPress, you can make your church website appear as an app on a mobile device without having to pay the cost of actually having one.
It’s one of the many perks of choosing to use WordPress as your CMS (Content Management System,)
What? Keep It Short & Simple. People want to see what you have to offer.
However, they don’t want to be overwhelmed with having to read a massive amount of text just to get the idea. Save that for your articles.
People in today’s world digest things in small chunks. If you keep a visitor on your church website longer than 20 seconds, you had best count your blessings.
People will treat your website just as things they digest on Facebook. We like to refer to it as “Scroll & Troll.”
That’s certainly something you would like to avoid.
When you keep your church website design minimalistic, you will gain a stronger presence and keep more people coming back to engage with you online.
There is absolutely no need for you to feel overwhelmed with trying to figure this all out on your own.
That is why you would want to allow someone who has years of experience in both website design as well as working with churches and ministries of all sizes to help you out.
I realize how daunting and overwhelming trying to create that perfect church website design can be.
I didn’t just become an expert at this overnight. I have spent the past 10 years in a state of continual learning and implementing new techniques.
You can drop a comment on this article, or you can reach out to me directly by email. I would love to hear from you to see what we can do to further assist your ministry.
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