Characteristics of a Good Church Website

The world judges a book by its cover. Unfortunately, churches are not an exception to that and so is your website.

Just like a business, your church website is your visitor's front door. It does tell a lot of things about you. Internet users nowadays are getting more and more intelligent and they know what a good website is when they see one.

So what does your church website speak about you? Does it give the visitors the right message about your church?

Let's look at some characteristics of a good church website.

1. Less is more. Get rid of the clutter factor.

Contrary to what we think that the more information you put on the homepage the better, it is actually more friendly to your church website visitor if you put lesser information on the homepage - allowing them and encouraging them to easily navigate through the areas that they need or want information on.

They key is to discover the areas in your church or information that you want the visitors to quickly find such as upcoming events, getting involved in a ministry and sermons or what to expect when they attend as a first-time visitor.

2.  No flash intro please.

Other than flash intro is not only user-friendly and search engine friendly, it is a thing of the past. A lot of website users nowadays just skip through flash intros to get right in to the page where they need information on.

You have to keep in mind that your visitors are "time-poor" so having a flash intro that doesn't give significant information about your church should not be an option.

3. Intuitive Navigation.

A good church website has easy to find information. In order to achieve this, an intuitive navigation must be in place. What does intuitive mean? It simply means that your church website menu would be available in one central location and is visible on all the pages of your church website (usually on a bar at the top below the header or wherever the designer decides to place the navigation but would be available on every page).

4. No neon colors and glittery effects.

Let's leave them to MySpace layouts for teenagers. Like we said earlier, web users are now more educated and more intelligent and know a good website when they see one.

5. Easy way to contact you.

Is there a way for site visitors to contact you by email? You might think that email may be impersonal. But according to some studies, there are web users that are actually classified as "introverts" and they prefer to use emails over phone calls. So provide both ways to contact you.