Websites

There are many studies that track eye movements when people go to a webpage. It helps us to understand what most expect when they go to websites. That’s called the web paradigm. If you break the web paradigm, people won’t understand where things are, and things won’t feel natural to them.

Perhaps you're planning to redesign your church's website this year. You've heard that WordPress is a good solution for churches and now you're ready to look for the right theme. How can you determine which themes are best for you to use? There's more to the equation than just design quality and cost. After all, you know what looks good right away and most WordPress themes are within a reasonable price range.

Your church website is very important. For many people, it is the front door to your church, the first impression that they get. Likely your website is also a resource to your members, a place to keep everyone up-to-date and promote events and such.

Defining the purpose of your website is most likely going to dictate the direction of a lot more than you likely realize. Here is the reality: by now, as church leaders, we know several things. We know that we need a website, it needs to feel modern, and it needs to look attractive. We know (or should know) that it needs to be responsive, that we want it to show up in Google, that we want it to be easy to add events and sermons … the list can go on and on.

Picking a WordPress theme for your church website can be a daunting task. If you weren’t overwhelmed by the number of church themes available on ThemeForest, you certainly will be by the multitude of themes and theme shops online with the “perfect” theme for your church.

Churches and church tech companies alike have been surprised by the fast-paced change and consolidation of church technology industry over the past three years. In 2012, private equity-backed Ministry Brands came on the scene with easyTithe, SimpleGive and SiteOrganic and quietly began acquiring additional church technology firms.

When researching technology partners for your ministry there are many different variables. What I'm going to talk about today are the five most important things you should consider when evaluating potential technology partners. If the technology partner you are considering values these five things, you can rest assured that everything else will fall into place. It's also important that the design looks nice and the user experience isn’t clunky. But if these five things are executed well, you can be confident the design and user experience will be of quality too. What I want to stress is that it's more important to understand why the company does what it does and how it does it, rather than whether or not they have a nice website with good sales.

In the past several years, the church technology industry has undergone many changes that have encouraged some, while discouraging others. As technology advancements continue, new companies start up and newcomers to the church tech industry enter and acquire firms to consolidate and rebuild. More recently, private equity firms have entered the space getting involved in acquisitions and shifting resources to various technology firms in order to position for growth and financial gain. All these moves cause disruption - to tech companies as well as the churches they serve; change is never easy.