Church website design, is it important? That’s a great question. Let’s go ahead and take a closer look into why it is important to have a well thought out church website design.
Sure, we all know as church member’s that there is a certain level of content that we can access from our ministry website.
Things such as sermon live streams, podcasts, events, what a closer look into what’s going on around the campus of our church.
But are we really maximizing our church’s website to the full effectiveness of what it could be used for?
Afterall, what are we really using our church website for?
As you can see from my featured image of this post, this happens to be my personal church that I attend. Let me introduce you to Crow Mountain Baptist Church, or as all of our crowd refers to it as, CMBC.
We’re trying to create new ways of reaching the unchurched with articles and things that are pertinent to what many of them are enduring in their personal lives in today’s world.
I am a firm believer that any church that has an online presence should be hyper focused on gaining the attention of those outside of the church.
It comes with no surprise that we are living is some of the most challenging times that I have experienced in my 56 year’s on the face of this planet.
Needless to say, when providing your content to any potential viewer of your website, making the most important item’s quickly and easily accessible is straight at the top of the important list.
If a person has to fight their way through your website’s navigation, then you need to be focused on getting things sorted out.
If you pay any attention to any web developer, you’ll hear them make reference to UI/UX design and experience.
This is relevant to both the user interface as well as the overall user experience.
Making things easy to find across you website will certainly keep visitors on your church website and hopefully, keep coming back for updated content.
The one thing I hate to see, is a church website that hasn’t been updated in its design and layout for years.
Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand the need to keep your site looking the way people are use to seeing it, however, after about 3 year’s, it’s truly time to update the looks and overall appearance.
Just like anything else, when you keep things fresh and updated, you keep the excitement about it elevated, which helps to ensure that people will gladly share content from it across their favorite social networking sites.
Let me jump on this bandwagon right now, and I know I’m going to take a bit of slack in regards to it. However, the whole “we believe in the Bible,” or “we love Jesus.” doesn’t need to be at the forefront of your church website.
I would like to think that most people are intelligent enough to hopefully recognize that those elements are already in place and exist, otherwise you wouldn’t even exist.
What does need to be at the very pinnacle of your content is “what’s in it for them.” People want to be enticed to visit with you at your church.
Having been in the web development arena for nearly 20 year’s now, the one thing that has proven itself time and time again when it comes to someone visiting a church, is that they are going to visit online several times before they make plans to visit in person.
How effective your church website design is plays a huge role in making that attraction.
Most church’s today are one at least one of the larger social networking sites.
You almost have to play boomerang between your church’s website and your social networking sites.
Content from your church website may push them to a particular post or event listed via your social networking site, and your contact button should push them back to your website.
This really helps to ensure that people are getting as many view of your online entities as possible.
A lot of church’s are now using live streaming as a way to both reach more people as well as current members who may not be able to physically attend any service.
The tools that have become available to produce a live stream have become nothing short of amazing and in abundance.
At our church, we choose to utilize Restream to deliver our content across several networking sites simultaneously. When focusing on your church website design, you’ll want to utilize the right tools that provide you opportunities of embedding content.
Of course, we utilize WordPress for all of our commercial, personal, and ministry website builds. This opens up so many doors to of propagating our content across several channels.
Every church website design project or even a re-design, this has to be one of the areas that we truly place a great amount of emphasis upon.
Do you wanna guess where I am going to go with this?
That’s right, let’s talk about those super big images. I love me some awesome pictures on any church website.
However, what I don’t want to see are images that are in 100MB in size and 5,000 pixels.
Talk about making my skin want to fall off. It is such a tragedy to see that whoever many church’s website developers may have been, doesn’t take the time to explain the importance of image sizes.
The “Diy’ers” group – I know for a fact, that a lot of pastors have to take on the chore of working and creating their church website design because they may not have a person who can take it on, or lacks the “know-how.”
There are so many online video’s available online via YouTube that will provide you with amazing tutorials if you are taking the DIY route.
However, we would rather you get in contact with us and let us take that headache and project off of your plate.
The quicker you can get your content in front of your site’s visitors, the more apt they are to stick around and explore what you have to offer.
Believe it or not, not everyone has access to 5G networks, or even WiFi for that matter.
So keeping your website slim and trim and loading quickly, makes for a better overall experience when someone is trying to access your website.
Lazy loading images can have an impact on how Google sees your website in regards to your overall LCP (longest content paint,) or how quickly it takes for your overall site be prepared to be loaded up and delivered.
I cannot stress this enough, quality hosting when it comes to your site does matter. I understand trying to keep the budget trimmed up when you may not have a lot of financial resources to cover your church’s online presence.
In addition, I fully understand that it can be somewhat overwhelming when it comes trying to figure out who is the best hosting provider to suit your needs.
Well let me help you take the guessing game out of that. Get your site and domain hosted with Ark Web Hosting. For around $50 per year, you can have superior cloud hosting that utilizes LiteSpeed servers and a CDN. Trust me, you won’t get these features with the ilks of GoDaddy or HostGator, or even SiteGround.
Of course, we offer this for free on all of our hosting packages, however, even if you choose to host your site elsewhere, this is an almost necessity.
If you choose not to use us, I want to highly encourage you to look into BunnyCDN. For most content and church website designs, for around $25 per year, you can secure an amazing CDN.
Now for churches that like to host their own videos outside of YouTube, they offer their own video storage as well. It’s pennies a day to utilize their service, and the results in speed increases, make well worth whatever you spend on it.
Well if you choose to go with the very best in class for your church website design, you can anticipate around 2 two 3 weeks to complete your design.
Everything is dependent upon how quickly you can provide us with the content necessary to complete your design.
Now if you choose to forgo the DIY route, this will depend upon how comfortable you are with using a pagebuilder, understanding the inner workings of proper website structure, getting your pages setup, and a whole host of other things that you will need to take into consideration.
There are several platforms available out there that enable you to get a site up fairly quickly. However, they come with their drawbacks. The very first, and certainly the most important, is the fact that you don’t own your content.
So what do I mean “you don’t own it?”
Very simple, if you decide that during any point in time during your contract with SquarSpace or Wix or any other entity, if you decide you want to move to another service provider, there is no way to export all of your data.
Basically, this means you’d be starting from scratch. Talk about a pain and struggle. Furthermore, let’s say you are using Square or Wix.
The amount of money you will have invested on an ongoing basis, will cover a solid build by us, and you’d own your content.
It’s a simple mathematical process, just do the math and you’ll figure it out.
Let’s say we give you a quote of $900 do a fairly simple design for you and give you several contact forms and other perks. If you go with Square, over a 10 year period, you will have spent $5,000. See where this is going, and it’s ongoing. It doesn’t stop!
Your church website design shouldn’t have to suffer at the cost of someone who wants to hold any annual contract over your head.
The one advantage you have if you choose to go with Ark Web Design to develop, produce, and execute a superior church website design for your ministry, is that we understand our community.
Each of our dedicated developers are member’s of various churches around the River Valley community. We have a vested interest in making sure that your online presence delivers your ministry content in ways that take your online presence to new levels.
In today’s times, we are witnessing a array of people who are struggling beyond belief. Everything from addictions, broken relationships, suicidal thoughts, a whole list of other things.
We all know what they are.
It couldn’t be any more important to get your church, ministry, or personal website up and online and begin to engage the various groups of people.
The biggest problem is, there just isn’t enough people across the board that are delivering content that helps people find tangible answers to some of the problems they are facing.
I’m not referring to Bible stories or sermonettes, I’m talking about people writing about how Jesus helped them out of similar situations.
That is what people are searching for. This is why having relatable content online is crucial.
Your church website design can be what makes a difference is in someone’s life.
The only thing between doing it and being successful at it, is getting started.
Even if you have an old website that is outdated, we can provide you with a solution that will breathe new life into your church website design.
Give us a call or utilize any of our content forms and let our team talk with you about how we can help you out!
