Web Tools...

So we've talked about flyers, logos and dramas, now we should discuss building your church's website. The web is an awesome outreach tool... when it is used properly. A bad website can negatively affect people's oppinions about your church (or business), long before they have ever stepped foot on your property! A bad website is far worse than no website at all! For one of my recent assignments at school, I was tasked with finding a BAD website, and making suggestions for fixing it. There is actually a list of the top 10 worst websites!! I found a doozey for my assignment! This site not only had flashing graphics, it had a distracting background, the words blended in with the background and visitors had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page to see the content.

When you are designing your website try to step out of your position, put yourself in the position of a visitor... What information are you looking for if you have never been to a church, if you know nothing about the church and you are looking for a church home. If you have small children, you will want to easily find information about the Sunday School department, if you are a young single adult, you will want to find out about the Single's Ministry... All of your departments should have their own mini-site attached to your main church site. The links to these pages should be easy to find and the links MUST work! There's nothing worse than a site with "dead" links (links that go no where).

I am going to focus on the navigation for this post. We will get into the appearance and content in more detail later. For now, I want to focus on navigation because in my humble opinion... Navigation is one of the most important parts of your site!

The navigation area of your site is the map that will lead people to your organization. The navigation should be easy to find and even easier to navigate. Visitors should know what page they are on and what page they are going to without having to search for a title. There are MANY free programs that can help you create drop down menus for your navigation. My advice is to do a google search and see which one you like. If you don't want to go through all of the steps to get a drop down menu, you can easily create a menu on the side of your page. A simple <UL> tag can help you create an unordered list that will make your items into a bulleted list. Sometimes a simple unordered list is all you really need for your navigation.

For our church's site, I used a program to help me get a horizontal menu with drop downs for the departments. The link to our site is listed below so you can see what I am talking about.

http://www.rosemarkupc.com/

Once you've decided how you want your navigation to look, now you must determine what pages you will have... The best way to design your site is to draw it out on paper, and keep these rough sketches so you can refer back to them while you are building the page. List out what pages you will need to make. If you have a Ladies' department, they will need a page, if you have a Sunday School department... they will need a page. Once you get all of the pages listed out, you can organize your navigation menu and see how many links your navigation will need.

Well I think that's enough on Navigation to at least get you started. Send me an email or a comment if you have any questions.