5 Ways to Have Your Church Website Ready for Re-opening
Days turned into weeks, which have now turned to months. We’ve been waiting. We’ve been yearning. We’ve been running nonstop. We have seen God do amazing things. We’ve seen countless churches thrust themselves forward through the technological decades. Audiences have grown and churches are reaching many new faces, God has proven yet again, he’s in control.
But, now . . . Is your church website prepared to transition these new families and individuals to your church building?
One of my biggest sayings is that a church website is hospitality. It not only greets the visitors where they are but walks them through and introduces them to every area they may need to know. As of lately, we’ve skipped the first few steps and connected the living room to the living room. They’ve now seen the inner room, but have yet to encounter the front door, the family, the bathrooms. It’s like the scenes from a spy movie where an individual is disoriented and has a bag pulled over their face to keep them from knowing where they’re going.
So, yes make sure all the protocols are up and easy to find on your website for a safe reopening. But maybe think through and adjust your website to help with any new visitors to your church building. This is a perfect time to invest some staff-hours into rethinking and strategizing what’s going to be the best areas for recalibrate. So, this next part is some ideas to work through as you craft your website to better welcome guests to your church!
PICTURES, please, please, please, have pictures of your church, of your people, of anything and everything that is your church. Maybe it is time for some new pictures of the sanctuary, front doors, greeters, pastors, and other important people. A big round of applause goes to you if you incorporate all these elements into pictures together, like greeters at the front door, or your pastor in the sanctuary.
Walk your visitors from the parking lot through the typical Sunday morning experience, both visually and through words. Use engaging copy to correspond with the pictures that you have now taken. The best way to think through this would be to think through how you would give someone a tour and introduce them to your church on a Sunday morning! It’s hospitality, but with people you haven’t seen yet.
Work through all the pages on the website and clean out any outdated information. Have everything proofread and work on improving some areas of copy where it gets confusing or choppy. Remember, people will without a doubt find their way onto pages that we had no clue existed.
Work on the flow of the website, remember that scrolling is more effective than clicking these days, especially because of the huge move to mobile website. Scrolling is natural and easy from a phone, where clicking links and buttons can be more difficult on mobile devices. So when a decision needs to be made, go with long pages over multiple pages that need to be clicked through.
Think of how it used to be common to have an about tab in the navigation where you click and it’s a dropdown menu with a ton of options, transition this to one page where the information flows well as you scroll through it. There are some tricks to make this work well for a larger website, but most small churches shouldn’t run into issues with this.
Last and certainly not least, please make a definite decision on the purpose of your website. It is either for visitors or members, there is no in-between. It is incredibly difficult to make a website that works well for both, but substantially easier to make a website for just one. It provides you a filter to make decisions by, which is one of the primary benefits to whoever it is that works your website. Trust me, they will thank you.
Do these things and you will be far down the path to having an updated website that will handle all the new visitors your church may have generated through your live-streams. As always, if you need any help or have some questions, feel free to reach out to us! With this new season of ministry, we will also be offering an expedited website build for churches looking for a new website fast! Feel free to contact us about that as well!
As a result of re-opening happening throughout the country, we wanted to offer a new service for the next few weeks, expedited church website design. We are offering a limited number o slots per week to have a website built in 7 days. If you are interested in this, click HERE.