Commandment #2 – Welcome 1st Time Visitors

MAIN POINTS

  1. Your website design should focus on welcoming 1st Time Visitors
  2. 2/3 of the website design content / functionality should address the visitor
  3. You must invest in a professional church website design

DESIGN YOUR CHURCH WEBSITE FOR VISITORS

What we are saying here is that your homepage should be designed specifically for that first time visitor.  Your members are not using the website as a general day-to-day means to find out what is going on in your church – they have many other means – the church bulletin, Sunday morning announcements, email newsletter, Facebook, etc to keep up with the events of the church.

We are not saying to remove current events from the homepage, but make sure they don’t dominate the homepage.  Have some small “lists” of current events going on with a link or button for “more events”… Some current events on the homepage will let that first time visitor know that the church is “alive” with good events and it is possible those events are the ones they are looking for (basically you can never predict what any one individual is looking for).

PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE DESIGN

Does your church website look like it was designed 10 years ago? Has it kept up with design trends so that it looks like a modern website? Whatever the design communicates is often the first impression people will have when they visit your website, so make sure the design is communicating the personality of your church and that what they experience on the website will be similar to what they experience when they visit the church.

MAKE IT EASY ON THE VISITOR

Make sure your church website is super-easy to navigate.  We always create a dedicated ‘welcome center’ type area of the site that welcomes the visitor, and quickly allows them to view all the pertinent info they need to know prior to potentially making a visit to your church.  The navigation in this area should be easy to use.

In summary, start loving that visitor and showing them your warm, friendly hospitality starting at the website!

On to commandment #3 which goes into further detail about the importance of keeping the website content current!