I keep fussing with this article and tacking stuff on. Sorry it has gotten so long! Hopefully it has also gotten better! ..and I promise I will make it look pretty one of these days. Your feedback and questions welcome. Email me at neil@sundaysoftware.com

You might be surprised by what I consider to be a "GOOD" church website. It's not one with all the bells and whistles. I've been creating websites for about ten years, including building my church's website. And what I've learned is that fancy does not necessarily equal good. Take, for example, this simple webpage you're reading... Good = Helpful.

What makes a church website "good" ?

GOOD = Fresh, inviting, and helpful.
GOOD = one that church members use  ...and visitors actually visit.
GOOD = a church website that allows members to talk with each other.
GOOD = one that's easy for volunteers to maintain.

Bad = Fancy but out of date content.
Bad = Professionally created but lifeless.
Bad = So time consuming the project eventually grinds to a halt.
Bad = Nobody goes there.
Bad = "Your Bad Here"

A good Church website:
    (1) communicates effectively with heart & soul, and stays fresh
    (2) builds community within the congregation
    (3) reaches out beyond the congregation
    (4) doesn't crush the person(s) who maintains it.

Simply "having a website" doesn't meet these objectives.
It's easy to have an embarrassing church website that's STIFF, uninspired, confused, and out of date. It's easy to have a website that sends the wrong message, and nobody wants to visit a second time (let alone come to your church the first time).

Bad Church Websites are easy to spot. The typical "gee whiz we're on the Internet" website has a "message from the pastor" in big black letters, a picture of a large brick structure, and information about the upcoming picnic that was held last month. Dark photos of bored people abound on church websites.

Links to Examples of good and bad church websites

Many churches have discovered that they are getting the most visits from their own church members and not so many from new visitors. So just WHO is your Church Website FOR?

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.

People need information. But they are fed by community, a sense of belonging and fellowship.

Increasing numbers of people use the internet to connect with other people beyond just email. The church word for that is "fellowship."

One of the most important parts of your church's website could be a message board where people can discuss, suggest, post, archive, and debate. It's a wonderful thing to be able to talk with members on a message board in-between the face-to-face times. And they are FREE and EASY to set up. They allow members to provide fresh content, and give people a reason to come back.

Message boards are in addition to your regular church web pages.

Here are a few things you can do with a message board:

• Suggestion Box --put up one for your worship service, facilities, programs.

• Post a Sermon --and be prepared for feedback.

• Committees  --We keep all the minutes, documents, suggestions for our Tech Committee online in our message board. We also discuss topics in our private Tech Comm area of the board.

• Schedules --our choirs post their rehearsal and special event calendars online for reference 24/7

• Mission News and Photos --at my church's website, our mission trip participants post daily reports and photos from the field. No techie help needed.

• Create Polls --every message board software has this feature. Poll your members about plans, schedules, ideas. We also use polls in our committee boards to see what meeting dates are good for everyone.

Message board software is often free. It can be installed to your site by your internet hosting provider.

My service provider installed "Yabb" on our church's site for free. Works great. We use it to carry on discussions, and to facilitate the work of various committees. You cannot visit my church's message board without first registering because it is a "members and visitors only" board. We only approve registrations from members and visitors we recognize, not the general internet audience. Message boards CAN be open to the public. Your choice.

View screenshots of a church's message board

 

CAUTION: 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" 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 You can set up a Topic in a message board titled "The Pastor's Blog." Same thing.

But here's the beauty of "Board over Blog" ---other staff, leaders, and committees can set up their own topics to create their own discussion.  Blogging is mostly ONE-DIRECTIONAL, top-down, listen to ME.  Message boards allow your members to talk to each other.

"Being fresh" isn't easy to achieve. It takes time to keep things fresh. That requires commitment from someone who knows what they are doing. If you can't commit the time to keep it fresh, then don't design your website with too much to keep up to date.  Stick with simple. And add a message board. Let your members "add the fresh" by giving them a message board.

Quick Facts About Message Boards

• Get a good one. I like Yabb.com. It's free and well built. See what is being offered by your internet host.

• They are easy to manage, -if you know a little bit about web stuff.

• They have lots of security controls, so you can make some discussions private, give special viewing permissions to certain members, and block nefarious posts.

• As the admin, you can get email notification of every new post so you can keep an eye on things.

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 five 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.

Having rebuilt my own 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... I have concluded three things:

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."

 

1) "What a church or staff says it wants, isn't necessarily what it will support or use."

I have to regularly remind my church's staff to keep things updated, even though we made it VERY easy for them to update it themselves. There's nothing wrong with that. All leaders need helpers, ...and I'm willing to help. But what this means is IF you build a website for your church, you need to plan on working on it over the long haul.  You know that old proverb, "raise up a child in the way they should go" ?  You have to train your church and staff to use the website too. To put it another way, build it, and they still may take a while to come.

If you're the pastor reading this, you need to know that pastors often lament to me about the person who volunteered to build the website. They didn't know what they were doing, and/or didn't stick around for the long haul to keep improving things. Others lament having a website that's impossible for the next volunteer to change because the first one created the website with special web codes and databases which not every web volunteer understands or has the tools to update. 

Some churches hire someone to do the heavy-lifting of building the website, then use a volunteer to provide updates. This means that if you hire someone to build your church website, you will need to budget "update" money.  It's not a bad idea. But make sure you're hiring someone who knows how to build a website. I run across church websites all the time that are poorly designed by companies.

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

I was at a small suburban church for 10 years, and helped them with their site for 6 years. The site wasn't fancy, but it was colorful and happy, and utilized many of the extra special techniques mentioned in this article. Our main page had a button that says "make us your home page. We also had  links to the weather forecast and religious news headlines to run on our main page, along with putting a Google Search BOX on the page. These aren't just links, they were part of the page. All these "feeds" from other websites are free. (Note: I'm not at that church anymore and they have since put up a different site that is not good.)

How we kept it fresh.... The center column of our webpage was text which the church staff could update without having to know HTML or upload a new page. With a little bit of code wizardry, we made them their own "update" webform on a special webpage they can access. You can learn about how we did that by visiting www.sundaysoftware.com/resources/htmlarea.htm. When they filled in the web form and click 'update' it puts their text into the main page of our website. Pretty slick.

We also put up a message board. It was free software that came from our ISP. They even set it up for free. Very easy to use. They used it to store certain documents, post schedules, and share email addresses. The message board was used mainly to archive schedules and meeting notes.

When you have an internet service provider host your website, a good one will also give you an 'online control panel' which includes server statistics about your visitors and pages viewed. Below are the webstats for the first five months of 2004 at my former church's site. It had been up for 7 months and advertised modestly during that time to the church members. (212 members)

"Unique" visitors tells us how many different visitors came that month. You only get counted once a month for that number. So we had 1165 different visitors make a grand total of 1330 visits last month. As you can tell in the next graphic below, only about 15% of our visitors in May stayed more than 2 minutes. Based on these numbers and some experience, and by excluding those who visited for less than 30 seconds (accidental visitors and web robots), I can guesstimate that most of our "more than 2 minute visitors" visited on average TWICE in the same month. So, for example, making weekly changes makes no sense. At least not now for us.

2007 Update on numbers:  That site had 2037 visitors in May of 2007. Compared to 1330 in 2004. Church membership remained the same. I left that church in the summer of 2007.

The most helpful interpretation comes when we compare year to year statistics. In general, healthy percentage increases are a good general indication of overall traffic and importance to the members.

Yes, your web server and server stats can tell one visitor from another because each person who comes to a website has a number assigned by the referring server. You just can't tell who the visitor is. For example, my webstats tell me that "adsl-68-75-17-163.dsl.wotnoh.ameritech.net" viewed X total number of pages last month and created X amount of megabyte transfer (bandwidth) last month. The "number of visits" tells us how many visits those unique visitors made to the website. So let's say I visited on April 1, 5 and 10th. That would be a total of 1 unique visitors making 3 different visits. "Pages" shows how many different pages were viewed. "Hits" is often quote but very misleading stat. If I view this page, that's one hit, plus I get additional hits for every graphic/image on the page which are also considered hits. Thus one webpage can account for several "hits."

Our webstats also tell us HOW LONG each visitor stayed at our website, and which webpages they viewed. In May of 2004, 86.5% of all visitors accidentally step into our website and stayed less than 30 seconds. But 14.5% stayed longer, and 127 visitors STAYED at our website for over 2 minutes. I'm always wondering who those "15 and 30 minute visitors" are, God bless them.

127 visitors who stayed for over 2 minutes --that's good. Our stats also tell us the time of day they came to the site. HALF of those visits were "after hours." In fact, my pastor chuckled when he saw the visitors coming to the church website while he was asleep at home. It's a surprising world these stats have revealed to us. We've also seen a spike in "visits" toward the end of the week. Could that be folks looking for Sunday info? Could be.

Update: The number of visitors who stayed less than 30 seconds DROPPED to 59% in May 2007. We're making progress! The biggest reason was probably our message board. Since we added it 7 months ago, it has become our #1 destination on the site. And even more happily... our Visitors Page is now our 6th most viewed page. Up from 11th last year.

What do our visitors VISIT at our site? Consistently our staff, photos and worship pages get hit the most. Mission and CE are a distant second. Why staff? My guess is that members are looking for staff email addresses. We also put our full contact info on the staff page, things like our fax number. These stats made me go back and make sure our Staff webpage looked great. So many church staff webpages look terrible, beginning with lousy pictures of staff, or cheesy glam/Olan Mills photos. Go for the natural friendly photos, please!

We do NOT know how many of those visitors were church members, but what these numbers DO tell us is that our website is useful to a large group of people each month at a cost of only $16.95 a month to maintain.

One recent Sunday over two-thirds of the members in worship raised their hand when asked if they had visited the website in the last month.

3) After you're gone, if the staff didn't really care, the site can become a wasteland faster than you can say "Death Valley."

What if I told you that I had a sure-fire way to get 1 visitor a day to come visit and learn more about your church. And it cost you less than 20 cents a visitor?

 
My guess is you'd be ecstatic about the idea. In May of 2004, our little website had 1165 unique visitors, 88 of whom stayed for over 5 minutes. That's about 3 serious visits a day, at about 20 cents per day "serious visitor" per month. (Now that I have my church's website linked to this article, I have to read my statistics report to 'exclude' those visits coming from this webpage. Once again, a good stats program can help you understand your website).

Two more interesting statistics: we know how many visitors "bookmark" our website in their browser's "favorites" list, and we can tell from many of the visitor server IDs that MANY of our visitors are indeed locals. We can spot the local server IDs such as columbus.rr.com, osu.edu, and ameritech.wotnOH.

One disappointment has been our Message Board. I thought more people would use it. So far, it hasn't worked that way. The problem I see is that we do not have compelling information on the Forum. We've posted Bible studies and sermons but seen on a mild interest in them. We are going to be patient about it. This has led me to another insight: don't exhaust yourself creating every possible thing you can imagine for your website. Somethings are better left for another day.

We ARE all of us in the very early stages of learning how the web can enhance our ministries, and how our members will communicate with us over the internet. Even a modest site can produce measurable results NOW.

With these insights and experiences in mind...
 

Here are Neil's Tips for Building a Good Church Website:

• Design your site for your members, especially those who surf. Design a page they can use as their "start" page or "home page" that pops up every time they turn on their browser. Put a button on your main page that says "make this website your homepage." It's an easy button to code. Every browser is designed to open up to some webpage. Make your church's site the first thing your members see when they start surfing the net. (Notice this is my top suggestion. Create and coding the habit of coming to the church's page is important IF you are creating a site that will stay fresh.)

• Design your site ABOUT your members.  Show visitors who you are, what you're like, and it will also remind members why they are members!  This requires plenty of PHOTOS. They are word a thousand words.

• Keep it simple. Don't create so many pages that the work of updating becomes tedious. 5 or 6 well done up to date pages are better than 10 pages that look amateurish and are out of date. One or two "updates" a month will suffice for most members (see my discussion above for this reasoning).

• Friendly photos, photos that are friendly, photos of friends!

• Make sure you have excellent server-provided web statistics. Cheapie "counters" like you see on some sites are useless. Stats will help you build your case for a better site, more staff input, or keep your creative work under control. Share these stats with church leaders. Many will be surprised. It will also get them to use the site!

• Instead of boring mission statements and 10 second downloads of the church steeple, give them a brief reminder of a coming event and a pithy verse, quote or recent sermon one-liner to start their day (or evening) on the Internet. Keep it fresh.

• Watch your language. Many church websites read like they were written by computer geeks. Write them from a P.R. angle. Give your website personality!

• Provide links right on the main page to major search engines like Yahoo! which is probably where they will go next.

• Maintain a "links" page of Internet sites suggested by fellow members, such as websites for parenting issues. One of my favorite sites to recommend is a family movie review site (you can link to it at my software page). List the local movie theater. A lot of web surfers check the web for movie times and reviews.

• Create opportunities for members to share with each other. Talk to a website designer or your Internet Service Provider about list-serv discussion possibilities for bible studies and discussion groups -or do these through a message board right on your website.

• Create an email newsletter members can subscribe to for free. The e-news can alert them to upcoming events, changes and new resources at the website.

• Create a message board page where members can respond to each other's needs, ideas, and can conduct a running bible study. If your church is large enough, you may find that it fills a need for a small percentage of your members, and will grow with time. A message board can also provide you with an email newsletter function

• Make sure your site appeals to teens and 18-45 year olds. Design content with them in mind. (See the Pew Report on seniors to go on-line). Mom & Pop old-fashioned looking sites are a waste of time (and yet that's what many churches create --dumpy and frumpy looking things).

• Work with a committee.

• Make sure somebody other than yourself believes the website should look good and be functional, -and knows how to make it so!  ...otherwise there will come a day when you move on and your work ends up a wasted effort.

After all that, have other pages for "new-comers" and communication pieces.

• A boring "Welcome from the Pastor" is of dubious value. Instead, provide a happy picture of the pastor having fun at a church event. Include three or four sentences from the pastor, MAX. This can change every month.

• Spare us the two page description of the youth program. Instead, post two recent youth photos, coming events and contact info, and a page to print containing the standard medical release form they have lost. Post a page of links for youth submitted by youth.

• Mission pages are a must. Give us a list of the projects you support along with two or three pictures of members in action (small file size please).

• I lose about two softball schedules a year, give me a page where I can print out a new one.

• Create a page new-comers can print out that has critical info they can post on their refrigerator: Sunday schedule, phone, staff names, map to the church.

Repeat visitors prefer fresh content over glitz (but everyone likes nice graphics).

• Keep your content brief, well organized and fresh. Make it look nice but don't over do it.

• Change/Add something new about every two to three weeks. This can be as simple as worship updates and a "favorite photo" of the month.

• Change a significant design element on your main page every couple of months. Keeping it fresh with "site of the month" type of stuff will keep folks coming back.

• Save us from poor web design, sites designed by automatic "free web page" offers, and sites hosting by providers like Geocities that place advertisements on every screen.

• Everybody likes to get email.. Create opportunities for members-to-member and member-to-staff email.

• Create church screensavers. Screensavers are easy to make, inexpensive, easy to download, and easy to install --and they're great reminders!

• Post council minutes for officers (especially for those who travel).

• Post sermons, newsletter articles and pictures of recent events.

• Learn how to optimize your photos and graphics for quick download.

• Create a section on your main page that has changing pictures/graphics. There are several Java scripts that do this automatically --with no management needed other than posting new photos to a file. These scripts can be found for free on the Internet.

Put your church's website address on absolutely everything: your lawn sign, your letterhead, and in your bulletin. Purchase refrigerator magnets with the address printed on them. Publish your website URL in the newspaper with an article about how you designed it. Having a site nobody knows about doesn't work.

Spend the money to get a "domain name" such as "www.firstlutheran.com." Do not cheap it out and create a site at "www.firstlutheran.freewebpages.com." Eventually you will want to move your site to a new provider and all your literature will have the old web address. By purchasing a domain name, you can switch service providers and never have to change your published web address.

Take GOOD photographs, and make sure you process them correctly for the web. I've seen many church websites with good text and graphics, but lousy photographs, or photos whose file sizes are so big, the page bogs down on slow connections. One church recently asked me to review their website. They must have had 30 photos in a nice online album. But I kid you not --almost every person in every photo looked like they had just swallowed a Bible, -sideways. Members like to see themselves, but nobody likes to see themselves look bad. Visitors are trying to imagine "if that congregation looks friendly, and will I fit in." Take good photos, but also know how to process good photos for the web.

Your photos must be compressed and processed for the web. No photo should be over 60kb. Most photos need cropped. Most photos need lightened and their colors slightly boosted. Compressing photos for the web makes them a bit dark. This all takes a good software program. I recommend Photoshop Elements 2.0. It's under $80 and will make your web photos look great.

Yes, you can use photos of Members and their Children on your Website without permission. -an article spelling out your rights and theirs.

Who's Building Your Website?

If you're just sticking a vertically oriented ("contact us") website on the info superhighway, do something small and cheap. You probably have a Sr. High who knows how to create this type of site for you. Or you can pay a few hundred dollars for a professional looking front page and a few minor pages. Just remember, if you pay to have a website built, you will likely get a website that needs a professional to keep it updated.

Take a look at 50 church websites before you make yours. See how many are quite awful, and how many are no longer kept up to date. This should tell you a lot. The average church is real good at wanting a website, but not so good at maintaining it. And the average website volunteer gets tired of doing it all by themselves after a year or two. Too many websites are created by well-meaning volunteers with the technical know-how --but with very little understanding or input about WHAT should be at the website. A church website should have a concept and design before it is constructed.

If you have plans to create a communal style website, you may find that you need help in doing so. The first bit of help is from a design TEAM. The second bit of help may be needed from a design COMPANY, or web technician. There are some very good things a web company can design for you that will be very helpful over the long run. For example, at my church's website, we had a fellow create a small bit of code that allows the church staff to update our main page's "NEWS" section --without have to upload a webpage. They simply log-on to a webpage, type in their text, and click "update" ...and that text gets sent to the main page of the website. Pretty slick, and very simple & inexpensive for a real web technician to create.

Warning: There are many "Christian web companies" on the Internet. Avoid most like the plague. It is shocking to see how many there are listed on the web who themselves have poor websites, backwards ideas about web design, and offer no help with tools that promote community. Choose wisely.

One of the BEST church website hosting and tool providing companies I've found is www.e-zekiel.com. I have no business connection with them whatsoever. Their webpage building tools are great. Any non-techie can build a website and manage it. Everything is done online by selecting from menus. Any pastor can keep content fresh without having to learn html. AND they offer message board and email newsletter tools to you. Their prices seem very reasonable too. My church's website didn't need them because they had me. Read my lament on my former church website's descent, and you can see I would have been better off NOT to have made them a site, but rather, taught them how to create/manage one through ezekiel or the like. Hindsight!

If you have questions or suggestions on this topic, feel free to email me, Neil MacQueen, neil@sundaysoftware.com

Neil MacQueen is a Presbyterian minister, interactive software and web designer, and President of Sunday Software Ministries.

Copyright 2004, 2007 Neil MacQueen. This article may be copied for non-commercial purposes provided that the author and this website remain with the article.