Oct 06 2008
Is Your Church Website Useful?
I recently interviewed Brandon Steiger, the founder and “Big Idea Guy” at Synergema, a website development firm that serves churches and nonprofit organizations in implementing effective websites. Since this blog focuses on church technology, I asked him what he sees as the top three issues that churches face in terms of creating a powerful, usable websites. He offered up three great points that can help you understand how to get out of your own way and build an effective church website that is built with your congregation’s needs in mind:
1) The Church’s Own Team – I can’t tell you the number of times we work with a church and
they really have no clue of why they are doing the things they do on their website. So what ends up happening is that the senior pastor sees a really cool feature on another church and they say, “I want it,” and then it’s
requested of us to build it (it can be a single feature or it could be replicating an entire website). There is no reason other than it’s cool and some other church has it. When building a usable website, it’s important to know and understand your audience and then to build features that meet the needs of their users. Some of the coolest features that we build are hardly used by visitors because they are highly desired by someone on the staff.
2) Identify Your Audience and Their Tasks – When building a website, you need to understand who you are talking to. Identify your audiences, and no it’s not everyone on the planet! You may have different types of audiences – for example you may say that we have families that are new the area. The next step is to learn more about those new families that are moving to the area – why did they move here (job, finances, schools, etc.), average number of kids, ages of the family, what’s important to them, and what do they think of the church generally. By answering these questions you will have a better understanding of your audience – so for example, if you are primarily reaching an audience that hates the Internet maybe a website is not the best thing (I couldn’t think of a better analogy). Once you understand your audience and what is important to them it will help you understand what they would be looking on your web site.
3) Lack of Thorough Thinking – A big part of usability is really thinking through the process that a user would take through navigating a site. Studies have shown that users will click more than three times to get to content as long as they are confident that they will find what they are looking for. This was proven on the HP website where the average user can click 26 times before finding what they are looking for. So this means for the church it’s very important to think through the process a user must go through in finding content. For example, a user may be looking for a message series dealing with love; however if you go to most church websites that have podcasts you will see the sermons listed by date and possibly by sermon series. Why not go the step further and allow users to sort the podcasts based upon categories or tags. A category could be titled “Love” – then the user could see all sermons dealing with love. You could follow this thinking by allowing for categorizing the podcasts by topic, by books of the Bible, sermon series, date, author, and others. We just need to get our head wrapped around the audience and why they are there, so in some ways #2 above is the primary piece that churches struggle with in usability for their own websites.
At Synergema, we have seen a huge difference in the quality of the website from client to client if they want us to go through what we call an Expression Analysis process where we identify the audience and their tasks and then design the site around the knowledge (to put it simply) versus the clients that just want us to develop a sitemap, designs and then to build the site. Yes, it’s more expensive in the beginning but the long term costs of not having to redevelop the site so frequently ends up costing way more.
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