Some projects dictate that you look at every detail. Are you building a house? You need to know where every light switch and electrical outlet will be. They may seem like trivial when figuring out the arrangements of the rooms, but it needs to happen. You may have a kitchen window that lets in the first rays of morning sunlight. Yet your toaster, blender, microwave, and mixer all share one outlet. Please realize that getting the big idea is the first step. Next is digging into the details that will make using your church website a truly pleasurable experience.
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Tag: User Experience
Helping Church Hospitality With Your Website
Your website works hard to get someone through your doors. Does the experience stop there? No. Ushers and greeters are some of the first people a new visitor encounters. What can you do to help those key pieces of the welcoming experience? This article explores how can you use your website to help them, as well as grow your hospitality team.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 63: Effectively Using Church Microsites
In a previous article I talked about landing pages and how your church can use them. Some projects and campaigns require more breathing room, so perhaps a microsite is the solution. Here you can create a unique user experience, strengthen your church’s branding, and even drive traffic to your primary website… and of course fill seats in your church.
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Avoiding Dead Ends
The message of this article is pretty simple. Every path on your website should have a purpose and not lead to a dead end. This may seem like a simple concept, but I imagine that many parts of your website do not accomplish this. Never give your visitor the message that it is acceptable for them to close their browser. There should always be another page with more information or a next step to take. In this article I will first explore the mechanisms and treatments that allow you keep the conversation moving. Then I will review the tools you can use to help find any gaps your website may have.
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The Importance of Sitemaps
Sitemaps mean different things to different people, and this article will explore the most popular definitions as well as their importance. The problem is that they all use the word “sitemap” for very different web tools. However when you begin to define what they really are, their purpose, how they are structured, and how to create them; you see they are indeed very different. This article will explore what they are and hopefully give you a better idea of how to use them to make better church websites.
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Using Libraries to Speed Up Website Creation
When dealing with limited resources such as time and personnel, you need to work smarter as well as harder. One key to gaining this efficiency is to not duplicate work. By creating a digital asset once and reusing it, you not only gain speed, but also consistency. This article will discuss several areas of website creation where libraries can be utilized to greatly increase how quickly you conceptualize and create websites.
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Encourage “I Don’t Know”
If how to create websites was figured out, a lot companies and people (myself included) would be out of business. I consider this to be an amazing period of time because we are still inventing, experimenting, and exploring how to fully utilize web technologies. Thus, in many cases when problems are set before us, we have no clear-cut way to solve it yet. Web teams need to become more comfortable with saying three very difficult words, “I don’t know”, and in this article I will outline when it is OK to say it.
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Why Your Church Needs UX
User Experience, and it is a growing field in the digital world. While many aspects of websites focus on the amazing technologies that support it, UX turns the lens back on the people using them. UX attempts to tie your church’s strategic goals to the people you are trying to reach. A practitioner attempts to not only make those connections work, but making them meaningful. This is the key reason why your church needs UX.
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Church eCommerce: Shopping Cart Tips
The shopping cart is one of the most critical pieces of an eCommerce experience. This critical piece of the experience is where your visitor prepares to give you money. As this part of the journey is so important, I will give you several tips on how to make that experience as easy as possible, remove frustration points, decrease cart abandonment, and increase sales.
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CWS Podcast – Ep. 22: Creating Your Church Website Navigation
Aside from what should be on your church website’s homepage, few things are harder than determining what the navigation structure should be. It is not only a technical decision, but a business decisions, and in some cases a political decision. Your primary navigation shapes how people use your site and ultimately how easily they can find information on it. By applying some basic information architecture principles you can come up with a structure that fits your individual church and utilizes common practices on the web. Topics include:
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Avoiding Dark Patterns
Although I encouraged you to apply common marketing techniques to your church’s website, there are many online marketing tactics you should avoid. There devious and deceptive methods meant to trick people into decisions they would most likely not choose outright. These are called dark patterns, and range from annoying to illegal. Churches and their websites must be open and transparent with their intentions if they are to be trusted, and them at all costs. This article aims to help your church in avoiding dark patterns.
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Find the Right Website Features
The key to having a great church website is not to have a multitude of features, but the ability to highlight the right set of website features to your visitors. Creating something complex is easy. Something simple with the right experience is extraordinarily difficult. In this article I will outline some steps to take to simplify your website while crafting the right experience your visitors want.
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