Website boot camp · five lessons

Five afternoons, and your website is good

A mother of two opens your website at nine on a Saturday night. She has one question and about eleven minutes: would my kids be looked after, and would I be the only one dressed like this.

Five things answer her, and none of them is a redesign. Your site is probably fine. It was built by someone who cared and then ran out of week, which is why these are the jobs that keep getting postponed.

All five are below. Read them here, print them, or have them sent to you one at a time.

Download the printable version · 6-page PDF, 427 KB

The lessons

Hardest first, so the rest feel easy

Lesson 1

Connect your church management system to your site

Somebody wants to help in the nursery. She tells you on a Sunday, you mean to add her, Tuesday happens, and on Thursday you send the email you meant to send on Monday.

That is not a scheduling problem. It is a website that cannot talk to Planning Center.

When it can, she signs herself up, and so does the person joining a small group, volunteering for the workday, or giving on their phone in the car park. Nobody waits for you to be at your desk.

This is first even though it is the least fun, because it is the only lesson that gives time back every week rather than once.

Ask whoever manages the site whether it is already connected. Five minutes to find out.
Install your church management system's plugin or module on the site. This one is a job for a developer, or for us.
Put your events, groups and signup forms on the site straight from that system, so they update themselves.
Turn on the automatic follow-ups inside it, so a new volunteer hears back without anyone remembering to write.
Sign yourself up for something once a month to check it still works. These break quietly.

Lesson 2

Pick one call to action and repeat it

Every ministry at your church asked for a link on the homepage. Every one of them had a good reason. So every one of them got a link.

Now a first-timer lands on a menu built by committee, looking for the one thing none of those links says: what happens if I turn up on Sunday.

Pick one button. “Plan a visit” or “Get connected.” Same words in the header, down the page, in the footer. Boring on purpose.

The other links do not have to die. They move one level down, where the people actually looking for them will still find them.

Audit what is actually on the site now, or plan the content if the site is new.
Sketch a sitemap before touching the menu: hierarchy first, then the top-level categories.
Design the menu around it. Short, literal labels; a hamburger on mobile.
Implement one consistent call to action across the site.
Watch someone who has never been to your church find your service times on their phone. Do not help. Whatever slowed them down is your list.
Add breadcrumbs on deeper pages.
Check analytics periodically to see how people actually move through the site.

Lesson 3

Write less

A first-time visitor usually opens your homepage late on a Saturday with one question in her head: what is Sunday going to be like for my family. She gives the page a few seconds to answer, and right now that answer is competing with everything else on it.

Somebody wrote that homepage with care, probably after a long week, and the words don't need to go. They need to move. Cut the homepage in half, and let your history, your doctrinal statement and your staff bios live on their own pages, because the person who wants to read them is a different reader with more time.

Read the homepage aloud, start to finish. You'll hear the filler you've stopped seeing, and anything you wouldn't say to a visitor standing in your lobby comes off or moves down a level.
Move the history, the doctrinal statement and the staff biographies to their own pages.
Give every paragraph that stays one job.

Lesson 4

Make it look like your church, not a template

Before anyone visits, they are trying to settle one question, and it is not a theological one. It is whether they would feel out of place.

A stock photo of a crowd cannot answer that. Neither can your mission statement. Only your own people can.

So the fastest wins put the real thing on the page: photographs from an ordinary Sunday rather than a launch Sunday, an events list that updates itself instead of a PDF from last quarter, your actual social feed so the site is never more than a day old.

None of that is a redesign. It is swapping what is already there for what is already true.

Put a live events calendar on the site, fed from lesson one so you never update it twice.
Put your social feed on the site so the page refreshes itself. Whoever manages the site does this once; it is not a monthly job.
Take twenty photos this Sunday: lobby, kids check-in, someone laughing, the parking team in the rain. Hand them to whoever manages the site.

Lesson 5

Put your address and service times where nobody has to look

Open your church website on your phone right now. Find your address and your service times. Count the seconds.

If that took more than about five, it takes longer for the person deciding whether to come this weekend, because she does not already know where to look.

Above the fold on the homepage, and in the footer of every page. Shortest job on the list.

Put the address and service times above the fold on the homepage.
Repeat them in the footer of every page.
Check both on a phone, not a laptop.

Church websites we build

Every one of these belongs to a real church.

If you inherited a site somebody else built

Do lesson five today and lesson three this week. Both are edits rather than projects, neither needs anybody's approval, and between them they fix the two things a visitor actually notices.

Leave lesson one until you have a week where nothing is on fire. It is the highest-value item here and the only one that needs uninterrupted attention from someone technical.

You did not build the site you inherited. You are not behind. You are five afternoons from it being good.

One lesson at a time

Or take one job a week

Everything above is yours already, no address required. But five lessons in one sitting is how good intentions die. Send them to yourself instead and you get one job every couple of days, with room to actually do it before the next one lands.