Why Your Church Website Needs Help..Now

by: Jonathan Howe

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Depending on who and what you read, you can find different opinions on how often you should redesign or refresh your website. If it’s a website design company, the answer is probably “six months ago.” They like the business, after all.

I don’t think you should have a timeframe for website redesigns, though. It’s an as needed event and also one that should be carried out with much planning and intentionality.

Website redesigns should be carried out strategically and to meet a need. So if your church has one of these needs, then it may be time to refresh your site.

1. Your site is not mobile-friendly. This is a top priority right now. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly, responsive website, find someone to fix that right now.
2. Your logo or branding changes. This may seem obvious, but if you’re going to invest in a new logo or graphic branding package, then make sure your website is redesigned to reflect the change.
3. Your site is not guest-friendly. Consider the content and layout of your site. Is it mainly for guests or members? If everything is geared to members, it might be time to fix some things.
4. You need to change website platforms. This redesign is typically forced. If you’re moving to WordPress or Squarespace as your web platform, then you will likely have to make design changes to the site. It’s rare that you can move across platforms and keep a consistent look and feel.
5. Your site is dated. This is more of a design aesthetic than the other items in this list. But if your site looks old and feels old based on the graphics and content, move forward on a redesign.

The first question I get when I write on website redesigns is who I recommend to do this work. There are several options available to you, but choose someone who knows churches and works with them. Our friends at MereChurch (affiliate link) do a great job helping churches and can help you, too.

Does your church need a website redesign? Have you redesigned your site recently? If so, what drove that decision?

> Read more from Jonathan.

Tags: Jonathan Howe, church websites, website

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Using Profiles to Build Your Communication Strategy, Part 2

by: Justin Wise

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Every church has different personas that make up the congregational body. Each of these personas—New Visitor, Return Visitor, Engaged Member, and Mature Disciple—all need different things from portions of the church website.

We started profiling these personas in a previous post, so today we want to finish out the group with Engaged Member and Mature Disciple.

Again, we’ll be revealing what our research shows as the most important sections for each of these two groups. Understanding the needs of each group is a critical path for creating an effective church website.

Engaged Member

An engaged member is someone who’s been at the church for over two years but no more than ten. They’ll be familiar with the church, the community, programs, and events the church offers. They’ll want to know things like:

Event Registration. How do they sign-up for classes, events, and programs on your website? This group showed the highest demand for an easy-to-use online registration process. Like the other groups, the website is most helpful to them in facilitating connection to the community.

Email Newsletter. Engaged members want their information delivered via email. Make sure there are easily identifiable places on your website to sign-up for e-blasts. (You do have those in place, right?)

Facebook Fan Page. Because engaged members are familiar with the church, they’re looking to connect relationally with other members of the community. More than any other social network, Facebook emerged as a front runner for this specific group. Judging by the data, if you were to poll your Facebook community on how long they’ve been attending your church, most of them will have been there for 2+ years.

Mature Disciple

We’re defining “mature disciples” as community members who have been at the church for 10+ years and self-identify as a Christian. Simply put, these are your “go-to” people; the folks you couldn’t do ministry without!

Here’s what interests mature disciples most on your church’s website:

Text Updates. Although this isn’t a distinct function of a church website, mature disciples were most likely to indicate a strong preference for receiving informational text updates from the church. You can facilitate this connection by offering simple ways for members to sign-up for text updates on your church website. Services like Jarbyco and Tatango are helpful when considering how to do text updates.

Small Groups/Home Groups. Not surprisingly, mature disciples wanted to know where to access information specific to small groups. Although this element of church life is important for all personas, mature disciples seem to be seeking out this information more than any other group.

Email Newsletter. Again, the longer someone attends a church, the more likely they are to opt-in to email updates. Relationships are formed, ministry allegiances are fortified, and people want to know what’s going on in the life of the church. Much like the engaged members, mature disciples proactively seek out information. Make it easy for this group to find email updates.

Conclusion

Community life is at the center of both of these groups interaction with the church website. The more you can facilitate specific connections to the community for these two groups, the more successful your website will be.

Read Part 1 of this series here.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Justin Wise, website

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Understanding Trends in Church Websites: Mobile First is Growing

by: Justin Wise

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If you wanted to predict the future of the web, how would you go about doing it? Further, what if you wanted to know how people accessed and utilized their church’s website?

For starters, you take a look at the hard data. We’ve been collecting data on 50+ churches for over three years and the data, dear friends, is astounding. If I told you everything we’re uncovering through these analytics, your head might explode.

But, not one to disappoint, here’s a peek into where we’re going.

We wanted to know, with a degree of certainty, what the trends were surrounding church websites. Take viewing location, for instance. The data we’ll be looking at in this post measures four areas:

1. Mobile
2. Computer
3. Tablet
4. Others

Here at Monk, we’re definitely seeing a trend with churches wanting to design for mobile-first. We worked with The Village Church recently to create a site-wide responsive design. If you’re not familiar with responsive, it means a website is “aware” of the type of browser it’s being accessed on—mobile, tablet, or desktop—and “responds” accordingly.

(If you want to see responsive in action, go to Village Church’s website and adjust the size of your browser window. Watch the images move! This is responsive design in action.)

The trends towards mobile comes with good reason and concrete data. Here’s what our stats show: Nearly 97% of users accessed their church’s website via desktop in 2009:

Keep in mind, this is only four years ago. Barack Obama was still a new President and poor ol’ Tiger Woods announced an “indefinite leave from professional golf” to work on his marriage. Seems like it was just yesterday but, of course, it wasn’t.

Our online viewing habits have changed significantly since then. Here’s how users accessed church websites in 2010:

It isn’t a big change, but the divergence from desktop was just beginning to pick up steam. Keep in mind the first iPad was released in April 2010—a stake-in-the-ground moment for mobile/tablet usage. Here’s what the same chart in 2011 looked like:

Desktop usage by church website users decreased 7.5% from 2009 to 2011. Desktop usage decreased another 1.7% in 2012, thus solidifying the downward trend for desktop internet use. Desktop is out. Mobile and tablet use is in. (Maybe that’s what led Google to declare “desktops will be irrelevant“…by 2013.)

Look at mobile-savvy cultures like India to see where the U.S. is headed in terms of website usage. According to Mary Meeker’s research, India become a mobile-first country in May 2012. for the first time in history, more people accessed the web in this country via mobile than did desktop.

This is not insignificant.

As the slide states, many more countries will follow. So will many churches. Organizations must begin considering a mobile-first environment. This can be especially daunting for churches who still wrestle with the purpose of their desktop-based website.

Conclusion

The data I’ve presented here is a small snippet of what we’ll be covering in our yearly “State of the Church Online” report, due out the end of this month. You can get early access to the report by joining our mailing list here.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Brand, Justin Wise, Social Media, website

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How to Use Web Analytics with a Service-Minded Mentality

by: Justin Wise

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Objections abound when it come to tracking, analyzing, and acting on church website data.

Confusion about where to start, faulty beliefs about data application, and dreaded assumptions lead many a church worker to believe web stats don’t matter.

Au contraire, my web friends. Tracking website data is not only a necessity, it enables you to serve your congregation better.

How? Read on, reader. Here’s how to use analytics with a service-minded mentality.

Attract more visitors to your church.

The more people are able to find your site, the greater the chances they’ll come to visit you on the weekends. The number of people who found out about their church website using a search engine increased 91% from 2009 to 2012.(Tweet this!)

Data analytics platforms like Google Analytics can show you the search engine terms people are plugging in to find your site. Maybe they’re accurate (e.g. “des moines church,” “lutheran,” etc.). But maybe they’re not (e.g. “san diego pet store,” “community center,” etc.).

You’ll never known unless you dig in and find out. You could have a wayward meta tag feeding Google the wrong info, thus diverting would-be visitors from your site (and, unfortunately, your church).

Optimizing your search results, along with your site speed and information architecture, allow would-be visitors to easily find you on the web. Doing so greatly increases the chance they’ll visit, thereby enlarging your church community.

Increase participation in programs and events.

Knowing where the bottlenecks are on your website is critical for understanding what community members want online. For instance, after working with MonkDev, Biltmore Baptist has a clear, visual picture of where their returning visitors are going:

This information allows the church to craft a website experience that keeps users looking and connected. Knowing what your people want—sometimes even before the event occurs—can help you intelligently allocate resources moving forward.

Build a website that produces disciples.

Our research shows the more church members interact with the website, the more likely they are to feel like a part of the larger community. Isn’t that interesting? When the website serves as a hub which facilitates community, people feel like they belong.

Creating a website where participation occurs doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something we call Mission Process Design: intentionally crafting an online discipleship path for users. This means the website actually moves people from newcomer, to participant, to engaged member, to all-star volunteer.

Again, a church doesn’t stumble into effective Mission Process Design. It takes hard work, winnowing the essence of your mission down with clarity, and translating your discipleship process to the web.

But it can (and does) happen. We’ve seen it with our own eyes. But it takes a commitment to data and finding out what’s actually working. The results, friends, are astounding. (In fact, you can find out if Ministry Process Design is right for your church.

Conclusion

Service doesn’t only happen on Sunday morning. Digging into church website data should be on the same level as serving as a greeter, volunteering in a soup kitchen, or leading a group Bible study for high school students. If you’re not sure where to start, let us help. Either way, your congregation deserves a website that works.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Analytics, Attention, Awareness, Justin Wise, website

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Does Your Church Have a Content Strategy for Its Website?

by: Justin Wise

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Creating awareness for local churches becomes increasingly difficult as more time demands are made on faith community members.

When a user goes to a church website to find information on programs, services, or to find directions, you have 7-30 seconds to keep their attention. If people can’t find what they need, they will go elsewhere. A cluttered website is not only irritating, it could be sending potential church members away in frustration.

Increase the effectiveness of your church website with a content strategy.

We interviewed dozens of ministry leaders and church communications professionals for our latest report, “Effective Church Content Strategies.” We wanted to show you what can happen in the life of a local church when their website is organized. A clear process emerges that savvy church leaders use to accomplish organizational and ministry goals. Conversely, this white paper will show you what happens when churches do not have a content governance in place for their online presence. (Hint: words like “painful,” “messy,” and “frustrating” sum it up!)

Learn how to assess the content that is already on your church website.

Melissa Therrien of Eagle Brook Church shares the story of when the staff went through a content auditing process. Each page on the website was sifted through with a fine-tooth comb, asking questions like:

1. Does this content accomplish our goal to reach people for Christ?
2. Does this help people who are wanting to find out about our church find what they need?
3. Do we know what our call to action is?

Does the content on your church website have this level of clarity and purpose? If not, you’ll learn how to start the content strategy process for your church.

Additionally, you’ll learn how to make your online content readable, understandable, findable, and actionable. Put simply, your church website will work for the user, not against it.

There’s a quote from the report that sums things up nicely: If your church can not be Googled, it does not exist. The church website is the new front door to the organization. Make sure when users come knocking, they find you standing with the door open, saying, “we’ve been waiting for you…Come on in.”

Tags: Attention, Justin Wise, website

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Is Your Church Website Mobile Friendly?

by: Matt Adams

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I have a tiny computer in my pocket. I bet you do too. I won’t lie, I’m super excited about that. According to an Internet trends report by Morgan Stanley, by mid 2013 more people in the U.S. will have the Internet on their smartphones than desktops. In many parts of the world, the smartphone is the only Internet because over the air technology is all the country really has that is even close to modern.

So what does that have to do with church marketing you ask? Everything. More people will be surfing the web on their phone than on their desktops. Yes smart phones can display most websites at a scale, but how much fun is that? Tiny text and drop down menus make me leave a site pretty quick. We can fix this tiny, zoomed out view by building media responsive websites.

What is Responsive Design?
Technically it’s fluid width content and site styles. It’s making content 100% of the available width and letting the text wrap to fit the screen size. Phew, that was easy right? OK seriously, you want a great looking site, blocks of content left, middle and right, dynamic sliders, recent sermons on the home page and the list goes on. So how do you get an amazing dynamic site that is equally amazing on a smartphone?

Great sites that work on all devices have a clear focus on the content, what’s important, and priorities. All sites and churches will have different needs, but I can guess that communicating who you are, when you meet, and how to get there are at the top of your list.

So first off, work backwards. What are those top key things and how does a user get there? What are the top five most popular pages on your site now, and how do people get to those pages? Really getting into the weeds with your content, site analytics, and knowing your audience will be critical in your planning.

Responsive Sites in Action
Visit these sites, and resize your browser window (sorry IE9 and under users, IE does not support media queries and just displays the desktop view)

• Starbucks
• Travel Oregon
• Build Windows
• Missio Dei Communities

Notice on all four how not only do they squeeze to fit, but the content re-wraps, images adjust and menus update to fit the finger friendly needs of a smartphone.

So how do you get to responsive design?

Read the rest of Matt’s article here.

Tags: Attention, Matt Adams, website

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Multisite Church Website Approach 1: Keep It Under One Roof

by: Justin Wise

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Multisite church planting has gone mainstream. As goes the church, so goes the website. We’re going to go in-depth with the Universal Website with Multicampus Information approach.

As we stated in the introduction to this series, the advantage to this type of site is having all the information under one digital content roof. It works extremely well in densely-populated areas where events throughout the week are available to all and are less campus dependent.

In most cases, the reasons for going multisite revolve around cost efficiency to broaden reach. Why have people drive 30 minutes to a campus when they can drive five and bring more of their neighbors with them?

If, however, a church is in a densely populated area, and mass transit is readily available, the geographical area to work within is much smaller.

Mutlisite communities like this can “blend together” without the need for developing separate identities for each campus. A member might participate in the men’s ministry at one campus and worship at another. Why? The campus for men’s ministry is closer to their work and the worship community campus is closer to their house. Convenience plays a larger factor in church attendance than most would care to admit.

Here are a few examples to consider as you map out your multisite website. While these churches are located in larger population centers, this approach can also be adapted for smaller communities. (For instance, The Leadership Network released a survey that said the median size today for a multisite church is 1,300 attendees.)

Park Community Church – Chicago, IL

When you click the campus links at the top of the page, Park Community Church shows you a “snapshot” for each location.

Each site displays the latest message, a featured event, contact information, and physical address. Great for gauging which location is most relevant for the user.

Redeemer Presbyterian Church – New York City, NY

Redeemer Presbyterian gathers all of their campus information onto one main site. The upper left corner allows users to sift through content for each campus using tabs. The benefit of this approach having all church-related content under one “roof.” The URL is fantastic as well!

Woodlands Church – Woodlands, TX

Woodlands Church lists all of their campuses on one page, giving the addresses, phone numbers, and service times for each location.

Once you’ve located a campus that works, you can view the events for that location. Best feature? The ability to filter events by ministry areas. This approach keeps users in one location, cutting down on distraction and location confusion.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an easy to way to start with a multisite church website, this approach may be best for you. Leave the microsite and stand-alone site planning for later.

Read the Introduction to this series here; read Part 2 here.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Justin Wise, Multisite, website

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Multisite Church Website Approach 2: Standalone Sites

by: Justin Wise

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We continue our Multisite Church Website series this week by looking at “Standalone Sites.” This is when churches choose to create separate sites for each one of their campuses. (By contrast, you might want to revisit last week’s post on churches who keep all campuses under one digital “roof.”)

This method works well when one church has multiple locations with separate preaching pastors and/or leadership teams. A church can convey that, while they are bound together in mission, each location has a unique identity. Locations have greater autonomy in developing their web presence.

We are working with Harbor Presbyterian here in San Diego to implement this strategy. Harbor chose this method because while it’s one church community, each campus has its own preaching pastor and leadership team.

At Harbor, each campus serves as a local area church with shared central services. Additionally, each campus has its own visual brand, contextualizing each campus for the communities they seek to reach. The church has seven locations and is launching new ones each year, with some being as far as an hour apart.

Here’s what their main site looks like. Note the different locations:

The Chula Vista site:

It should be noted that this approach requires a healthy amount of resources. With separate sites, each online outpost must be managed individually. Content creation, design, and updates must be accounted for on each site.

Aside from Harbor, here are a few more examples of churches who use the “Standalone Site” approach for their multisite website strategy.

Multisite Church Website Example – Highland Park

While Highland doesn’t have a true standalone solution, I chose to include it because each campus site is designed differently. Visually, they’re telling the user these faith communities are different. Some of campuses have their own microsite while others exist as a page on the main site. The giveaway is the URL structure.

Here’s the main site:

Here’s the page for one of their more modern worship communities.

Multisite Church Website Example – Woodlands United Methodist

The Woodlands has a structure similar to Highland Park. The separate campus has it’s own website, URL, and theme. Visually speaking there are similarities between the main site and the Loft campus. They are distinct enough to communicate a difference.

The main site.

The Loft Campus site.

Conclusion

The Standalone Solution would work well for churches who have more of a distributed ministry model. Each campus would be responsible for updating its own content, sermons, events, and ministry info. The downside? It can take more internal resources to manage and execute effectively.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Justin Wise, Multisite, website

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Multisite Church Website Approach 3: Campus Select Option

by: Justin Wise

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We conclude our series on Multisite Church Websites with the most common approach of the three, the Universal Website with a campus select option.

One of the most well-known examples of this approach comes from The Village Church in Flower Mound, TX. Let’s jump right in, shall we?

Here’s how you’re greeted the first time you visit the church’s website:

Before you go any further into the site, you’re asked to pick a default campus. This approach works best if you identify clearly where the various campuses are located, as The Village Church has done.

f someone is visiting the site for the first time, they may know nothing about your church and simply want to find the location that’s closest to them. This approach helps them do that immediately and then tailors the web experience for them moving forward.

After you pick a location for The Village Church, your browser automatically remembers your choice each time you come back. If you need to change campuses, you can. Just use the campus selector at the top.

The biggest benefit to this approach is clearly identifying your site locations and asking you user to self-identify with one of them. Teams managing the website also benefit from keeping church branding uniform. Content is managed easier with this approach, as one person can push content to multiple sites.

Here are some other examples of churches using the Universal Website with campus select option:

Biltmore Baptist Church

As you hover over each location, it displays when services are held, what the physical location is, and a link to Google maps. In the case of the online campus, it displays a countdown timer that shows when the next service will go live. Very helpful.

Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale

Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale helps you to immediately identify what location is nearest/most relevant for you. The “Times & Campuses” tab is prominently displayed in the navigation.

Click on it and you get this beautiful mega nav drop down:

Once you’ve found the church nearest you, you can quickly get to know who is behind each location without having to leave the page.

Conclusion

Building an online presence for multisite churches takes considerable planning, resources, and attention. Coordinating communication efforts across locations, whether two or 20, means forming an organizational-wide strategy and sticking to it. Ministry can, and does, happen online. Help your multisite church accomplish goals by having the right online strategy in place.

This concludes the series. To read prior posts: Introduction; Part 1; Part 2.

Read more from Justin here.

Tags: Attention, Awareness, Brand, Justin Wise, Multisite, website

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