James Ogley

Earlier today, I commented on Twitter that a lot of church websites “make me want to cry“.  This spawned a number of suggestions as to why it might be.  The simple answer of course is that it’s because so many church websites are just very bad indeed.

Now, I’m not a definitive expert on how to do it right – and indeed, the website for the church I lead is not perfect – but I’ve been designing websites for churches since the mid-late 1990s when I worked for Church Net UK so I think I’m well placed to offer some advice.

I’ve seen lists of the “Top Ten Worst Church Websites” before.  This is not one of them.  I don’t think it’s clever or cool to simply point and laugh at bad websites so I’m not going to link to any “offenders”.  All I intend to do is provide some simple guidelines of how to do this well.  Oh, and they’re in no particular order.

1. Keep it up to date.  This may seem obvious but I’ve seen too many church websites telling me about “forthcoming services” that were six months (or even a couple of years) in the past.  This isn’t on.  The web is an information delivery medium so make sure you’re delivering the information people actually need.  If your vicar leaves, update the staff list.  If you’re going to publish the news from your parish (in whatever way you do this – see below), make sure you don’t stop being bothered to do it.  Or, if you do stop being bothered, remove the news section.  If you’re really never going to update the site, just have a very basic page containing the address where you meet and times of services (since these change infrequently).
2. Make it look good and work well.  This isn’t to jump on the image-focused cultural bandwagon of the day but simply to recognise that the first bite is with the eye (please excuse the use of cliché).  Marshall McLuhan famously stated “the medium is the message”.  In most cases, this means that the medium chosen communicates as much – if not more – as the intended message.  In this case, I choose to use to say that how one treats the medium communicates how you intend your message to be received.  If your site looks ugly, it implicitly tells your visitors that you’re not interested in whether they read its contents.  If it is impenetrable, the message is you don’t care whether they even find the information they want.  Ask yourself when you look at your site whether you would use a news service whose site looks like yours.  If the answer is “no”, you need a redesign.
3. Don’t use buzzwords.  A message from your pastor is not an “e-troduction”, it is a message or a welcome.  Don’t imagine that because the medium is electronic that somehow you have to relate to it differently than if it were in print.  It will make people cringe and there’s enough about church that does that already.
4. If you publish news, make it easy to subscribe to that news.  Don’t simply upload a PDF (or, worse, a Word document) of the news sheet each week.  Use a content management system (WordPress or Joomla for example) which allows you to post each item as a separate story.  Then provide an RSS feed and post each item to Twitter.  Your audience can be roughly divided into two categories: potential visitors/newcomers and regular congregation members.  The latter are almost exclusively interested in the weekly updates – your news and sermon downloads (if you provide them).  Don’t force them to read the whole site every time they want to see that information – unless they want to of course!
5. If you can’t do it well, don’t do it!  Seriously.  Bizarre as it may seem, no website is better than a bad website.  If you’re part of the Church of England, populate your entry in A Church Near You – you can always redirect a domain to it if you want to publicise http://www.ourparish.org.uk.

So, that opens it up.  I’m sure other people can suggest other good dos and don’ts.  Add them in comments below (but I’ll remove any “naming and shaming”).