Designing a Web Site for Your Congregation

Plan Your Site

Careful planning and a clear sense of purpose are the keys to success in building an effective Web site for your congregation. Plan your site by following these basic steps

Have an Objective
Know Your Audience
Develop Content Before Design
Add Value

Have an Objective
Your congregation's Web site should have an objective; whether to inform, educate, entertain, or involve the viewer. If you can't clearly articulate an individual page's objective, reconsider including that page in your site. As an example, an objective for the Web site and for individual Web pages contained within the Web site would be:

"We expect our congregation's Web site to reduce the demands on the church office to publish and distribute a monthly newsletter. We expect to save a significant amount of time and on postage. The newsletter Web pages will carry all of the content that currently goes into our church's newsletter and will also carry more timely information as events warrant. After a year we will reevaluate the success of the Web site newsletter."

Know Your Audience
Before you start putting up pages on the Web, think about who your audience is, what you want to say, and how you want to say it. Approach the planning of your site from your audience's perspective and ask yourself, as a viewer, "what do I want to get from this site?" Remember, the Web is a communications tool. Most people who visit your Web pages are there in search of useful or entertaining information, not to admire your fancy graphics skills or HTML prowess. The knowledge, background, interests, and needs of users will vary from tentative novices who need a careful structured introduction to expert "power users" who may chafe at anything that seems to patronize them or delay their access to information. A well-designed system should be able to accommodate a range of user skills and interests.

Develop Content Before Design
The design of your Web site should be determined by the information you want to communicate. Define your content before you spend a lot of time on page design. You don't want to invest a lot of time and effort in page layout and navigation design only to later find that your design doesn't work for your content or purpose of your site.

Add Value
What makes a Web page useful is the unique information on that page. Avoid creating pages that are just a collection of links to other pages, unless you provide some additional value by organizing links into logical groups or adding informative descriptions.

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Prepared for Making Christ Known Conference November 22, 1997
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