10 Reasons Why Your Church Website Needs Work

Photo By .robbie

Upon surveying some friends and family members that traveled frequently, I asked them how they selected the church they would be worshiping at when they were in a different location. The overwhelming answer was the church that has a website that best displays what kind of service they provided and that had pictures of real people.

After doing some research on some of the local church websites in my area, I came to the shocking conclusion that they apparently don’t care about how their website looks or don’t have the right creative direction to send out the right message.

1. You have an over excessive use of animated clipart.
This may have been acceptable in the 90’s for personal home pages, but it should never be used on a church’s website.

2. You play background music that cannot be turned off.
If you want to really annoy your visitors, keep this feature because it works.

3. Your site is in frames.
So you figured that you would make it easy for the navigation to be updated. Too bad you didn’t realize that search engines and some web browsers cannot properly view frames.

4. The last time you updated the site was two years ago.
It’s always good to know what events took place in the past, too bad we have no idea what’s going on in the present.

5. You utilize scrolling marquee text.
Sure it may look okay on CNN, but it looks horrible on a website.

6. You use numerous font types throughout the website.
A little Comic Sans here, a little Arial there and a few Wingdings here, it’s a masterpiece! Perhaps only to a child.

7. You built the site using Microsoft Word.
It was easy, just outline everything how you wanted it and then save as webpage. It doesn’t matter how different web browsers and different screen resolutions see the site, because it looks fabulous on your screen.

8. You used Java or Flash for your navigation. Look at the pretty cool effect. It’s a shame that search engines have a hard time trying to crawl a site with that type of navigation.

9. You didn’t properly resize images before you added them on the site.
Why is that picture of the Pastor so blurry?

10. You have used the same website design for the past five years.
Why change it now? That old outdated look really defines our church.

It doesn’t seem all that shocking when you think about how we are constantly evolving technologically. Many people nowadays no longer use a phone book, when it is just as easier to find names and numbers online. A good church website design can go along way.

Is there more that could be added to this list? Please comment below to add on…