Perhaps the most important thing to think about when making any website, is the ease with which any first time viewer can navigate the site. Good sites welcome the viewer in; with easy to see and understandable links. A bad site however has links that are either hard to find or unexplained.
This is as important on a church website as it is on any other website. If a person who has never attended your church before, or even one who has been to the church but not the website, logs on and cannot figure out how to do anything they are unlikely to return. The goal of every website should be to bring people back. A church website that is hard to navigate is like having a labyrinth between your front doors and your sanctuary, people are fare more likely to turn around and leave if this is the case.
A few pitfalls to avoid
- Avoid creating websites that are more than a couple links from the homepage. Especially if the pages contain important content.
- Avoid putting to much on the any page, long pages that require lots of scrolling are annoying.
- Content that is not purposeful; visitors will get confused if they find things all over the places that do not seem to have a purpose.
Your whole website should be easy to reach from your home page. Think of it as a spider web, the home page is the center of the web. It needs to contain links that can get you to all of the important pages and have links back to it from every page. Each link needs to be self-explanatory, for example a link to the calendar ought to be called something with "calendar" in it. You want your links to be easy to see and understand so when someone loads the site it takes them at most a few seconds to find what they are looking for. If this is done properly first time visitors will be able to find anything they want to with relative ease and will be encouraged to come back again and again.