Test #1:   It's probably not a good church website if.... ...if your church's main page prominently features a picture or drawing of your church building. Explain it Neil: Pictures and drawings of your building are ok... but people are attracted by energy, not bricks. Ok...if your church is beautiful, maybe, but most are not. You do need a picture of your church somewhere on the site, but hopefully your content is refreshed so often you are posting photos of past and current events to show what a great community you have. Your web site's main page is NOT stationery (or for that matter, even "stationary.")

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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

 

The Most Powerful Feature of Every Message Board When people register, they must do so with a valid email address. That gives you several powerful opportunities. Because message boards collect email addresses, your staff can broadcast an email message to all board members with the click of a button in the control panel. INSTANT EMAIL NEWSLETTER!   Members can email each other by accessing each other's profiles. Again, we only let approved members see such info.   Most message boards allow members to "track" a discussion simply by clicking the "notify me" button in the discussion area they are watching on the message board. Then, whenever anyone else posts a new message in that discussion, the message board software AUTOMATICALLY ALERTS THEM VIA EMAIL that a new post has been made. In my church's message board, we use this feature in several topic areas, especially for committee meeting schedules that are posted. That way, anytime the chairperson CHANGES the posted schedule, the rest of the committee gets automatically notified of the change by email. Pretty slick! Ok...I'm going to add one more powerful feature:  Message boards count the number of posts, and the number of times a post has been viewed. For example, in my church's message board, there are 18 posts in the Worship Suggestion Box since we started it two months ago. And it has been viewed 142 times!  For a 212 member church, that's cool. These built-in counters tell you what people are viewing. Update: There are some good email newsletter services nowadays. Check out ConstantContact.com. If you build your site using Wordpress, you can also create a free "Feedburner.com" account that let's people sign up at your site to receive updates of all new content posted at your wordpress created site.

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."

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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.

 

Some stats worth paying attention to... Only 6% of Church Visitors come in response to advertising media. Your website's "effectiveness" as a billboard is only seen by 6 out of 100 visitors. Not great. What it CAN do however, is educate visitors who have already come to your church. Make sure they leave your facility with your web address so they can take a closer look at who you are.  47% of Church Visitors come the first time because they are personally invited by someone they know. Thus, your website should encourage MEMBERS to invite friends. Prepare a nice looking handout they can print and give to friends (include a map and friendly photos). According to a large 2004 study by the US Congregational Life Project, the primary difference between a member and a visitor is their "sense of belonging." Visitors are "looking to belong." Seems pretty obvious, but practically what that means is that your website should encourage a sense of welcome and "belonging."  It should be user friendly, warm, cozy, family-style, relational.  Not institutional, not cold, not perfunctory, not letterhead-ish. No shouting, and no hype. In study after study, people identify "warm vs cold" by the look on people's faces. Have great warm and "real" looking photos. Leave behind the studio portraits of scowling ministers, stock 'obviously canned' photos, and distant photos of the backs of heads. One last comment:  Members are ALSO looking for a sense of belonging. They need that nurtured and renewed on a periodic basis. Your church website should reinforce our sense of "church family." Other interesting research findings: Visitors comeback if the sermons are good, but join for the sense of belonging they experience. Sermons score high on "what attracts" but dive in the polls that measure "why we're members." The "sought after demographic"  -young people/families in their 20's and 30's, are big internet users, are more media-inclinde than their elders (read less!), AND are the least likely to be interested in a church's institutional concerns or affiliations. They are also the least likely group to be overly concerned with your doctrinal positions. Yet many websites look like "old guard" brochures. These stats come from various surveys, including The US Congregational Life Project (www.uscongregationals.org), Barna Research (www.barna.org), and the Pew Internet in American Life project. www.pewinternet.org