How to create an engaging website
In addition to looking after three churches in Cornwall, Kevin Pickup is a digital marketing expert. He answers five key questions.
What makes a good website?
The best element of a good website is the quality of the content and how user-friendly it is.
How long are people engaging with it, what pages are they looking at, can they find what they're looking for?
You might have the best-looking website in the world but if users aren’t engaging then actually, it isn’t very good at all.
What is its purpose?
What do you want your site to be? Is it a tool to encourage people to come to church, to promote content or a place to talk about your social action programmes?
Once you understand this you can ask what the best platform to build it on is – WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or even a bespoke package – and decide who's going to build and manage it.
What are you trying to communicate?
You need to ask this to determine how many pages you will have. A lot of churches have a ‘brochure site’ – like a brochure you'd find on a coffee table.
Others might say one page is more than enough – just a long scrolling site with information about the what, how, where and when.
Who is your audience?
I’d recommend you get something like Google Analytics plugged in. It's a really simple tool and not only will it tell you the number of visitors coming to your site, it will tell you their geographic location, the male/female split, whether they’re using a computer, phone or tablet, and their age demographic.
On top of that, you can go deeper and look at which pages are most popular.
How do you keep your site fresh?
Go back to your planning stage and ask how realistic is it that the site will be managed on a weekly basis.
If you've got grand ideas to upload the sermon on Sunday and the pastor really wants a weekly blog section, who will update them? There's nothing worse than going to a website and realising the last time it was updated was years ago.
Use your social media to get your day-to-day content out but don't neglect the importance of updating your website on a regular basis.
The top 5 mistakes to avoid
The team at Find a Church (findachurch.co.uk) are experts in using the web to help people find churches, and list more than 45,000 UK churches in their directory. With 3.4 million listing views last year, they identified five key mistakes to avoid:
Information overload
Keep your website clean and up-to-date.
Avoid the temptation to cram it with info; if something isn't key to your target audience (hopefully potential visitors and people exploring faith) don't include it.
Christianese
You can easily put visitors off by using in-house language.
Write your website in everyday language that makes sense to non-Christians.
Poor pictures
Choose great photos that showcase your church well.
Blurry shots, wonky angles and photos that don't obviously relate to church are off-putting.
Going on about the building on your front page
Unless you’re a church with big historical interest few people care about your building’s history.
It's people that matter and how you can serve them.
Restrict building mentions to relevant info like accessibility.
The wrong webmaster
Nearly always, a techie is picked to run the website, but while they’re great with equipment they may not be the best communicator.
Get a good writer on board to assist.
To see the full Elim Digital Masterclass session and get lots more advice from Kevin, check out:
This article first appeared in the August 2022 edition of Direction Magazine. For further details please click here.
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