What do think should be included on the home page of your church website? How should it be displayed? What options for connection should be most obvious? What are your goals when setting up your home page? How effective is your home page? How do you measure it's effectiveness? Check out what the folks at East Valley Nazarene have done with their homepage. It's simple and beautiful and I think you are going to love it.
We wanted to show you a great Church website that is incorporating some simple and clean design pieces that give it a great look and feel. The church, Mosborough Elim Church in the U.K. has set up a sub navigation on their site. It's really 4 simple images that they have dropped into their site and shown on every page. This, in essence, ensures that wherever someone is on the site, they will have a quick and easy way to get to the contact info, the service time info, and the info for guests with a simple click. The design that they have used for these images looks amazing. It fits well with the look they have implemented on their site.
Another thing to check out while you peruse their site, www.mosboroughelimchurch.co.uk, is the way that they have used sub-header images on each of their pages to build a sense of continuity all through their site. Make sure to check it out and as always, let us know if you'd like us to help you do something similar with your site.
Having an online presence for your ministry is more important today than ever before. As we all know, the Internet can be an amazing way to connect with people inside your community and to reach out to people outside of your community. The possibilities for what you do online are endless - from the very simple presentation information about times, dates, and locations, to the more complex and interactive features such as social networking, discussion boards, event registration, and podcasting.
As part of our job, the SnapShot Web Team looks at hundreds of ministry websites every week. Some are fantastic, others are mediocre, and to be honest, some are so scattered and disjointed that it almost hurts to look at them - having no website at all would be a better option. The most common thing that distinguishes the good from the bad and the ugly is purpose. Let us explain…
Before creating (or re-creating) your online presence you’ll want to make sure that you ask yourself this critical question: Why?
Why are you doing what you do with your website? What should the purpose of your website be? Is it simply to convey information or do you want it to be something more? Is it to grab people’s attention? Stir people’s emotions? Get people involved? Persuade people to take action? Is it to connect with those already involved in your ministry or to reach out to those who are not yet involved?
The reality is that if you don’t have a purpose for your website, your blog, or your facebook group – if you haven’t thought about why you are doing what you do – there’s a very good chance that you’ll end up with a scattered mess that doesn’t do anything all that well.