Do you ever have one of those days where you start to notice a bit of a trend in something, then all of a sudden lots of people are talking about it? I feel like that tonight. It’s been a busy day and so I’m catching up on some blogs and two of the blogs I respect a lot are both talking about the same thing…something I wanted to comment on myself!
First, the links: Brian posts today on the Leave It Behind blog: Great Churches Remove Barriers. Meanwhile Frank posts on his Strategic Digital Outreach: What Do Pet Stores And Church Websites Have In Common?
Brian mentions some of the barriers that people often have with going to church or participating in church and offers solutions. So many of them can carry over to online ministry also.
Frank makes the application a little more focused when he talks about what makes a church website unfriendly to visitors. he offers a couple of thoughts on what are the barriers:
- Pictures of the church building rather than of people
- Use of “Christianese,” language which is largely gibberish to unbelievers who visit our sites
- Site navigation which is difficult to understand or follow
- Websites which are not accessible
I can think of a few more reasons why a church or ministry website wouldn’t be welcoming to others:
- People don’t know the site exists (okay, this is more of reason why they don’t come rather than why they don’t stay)
- There is a disconnect between what they expected they’d find and what they do find on the site (due to marketing and/or search engine results)
- Their first impression of the site is what the expected (assuming it plays into all the clichés)
- There’s nothing of interest to them on the home page because the site is “self-involved” or not “visitor-centric”
- The layout, design, or technology is broken
- The site looks like it was “slapped together”
- No real clear indication of who the site owner is and how to contact them
- Site isn’t designed for them…seems too old/young/business-like/informal/formal/uptight/too loose…it’s just not designed with a real target audience in mind
I’m sure there are several other reasons, but those come to mind right away. What are your solutions to these things?
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Rob:
Thanks for continuing the conversation! I especially liked that you asked for solutions (unlike myself as I only complained!).
Unfortunately, my mind is like mush today and I don’t have solutions to many of your points. But one of the items you mentioned did stand out to me: the problem of a church website not being visitor-centric.
When I developed a website for a local church in our area a couple of years ago, we purposefully created a series of profiles of believers within the church and then put a headline section (a small thumbnail photo of the profiled believer and a text portion to catch attention) on the front page which pointed to those profiles.
Some of these headlines were:
1. Are you a musician? Click here to read how a man and his friends are sharing their stories through their love of music and their talents.
2. Are you spiritual? Click here to read how a man’s hunger for genuineness led him along a turning spiritual path until he made a surprising discovery.
3. Are you an actor? Click here to read how a man’s love of acting is being fulfilled as he lives out his childhood dream.
4. Do you have Hepatitis C? Click here to find out how a fellow survivor finds joy in life despite this virus which is more widespread than HIV and is soon expected to surpass AIDS in annual deaths.
5. Do you love auto racing? Click here to read how a champion driver finds satisfaction in life through devoting his life to a greater cause.
6. Are you an artist? Click here to read about someone who finds joy in his involvement with the visual arts.
7. Addicted to alcohol? Click here to read how a man who had everything discovered he really had nothing and how he was given a second change in life.
8. Do you like swimming? Click here to read about a fifteen-year-old who has excelled at competitive swimming despite the challenges of leukemia.
9. Do you have cancer? Click here to to read about a fifteen-year-old who has triumphed over leukemia by relying on her family and on her faith.
In the profiles, the believers shared about their interests and life experiences and how their relationship with Jesus integrated with those interests and experiences.
One problem we did encounter is that once the initial profiles were up, the church leadership seemed to feel that the site was done and didn’t see any need for further profiles. From my perspective, I felt like the more profiles we put up on the site, the wider reach the site would have.
In spite of that problem, I believe this is a very effective approach to introducing unbelievers to the life of the Christian community (especially if it were to be combined with allowing profiled believers to have their own sections of the site through which they could interact with site visitors - but that’s a big step for most churches!).
Unfortunately (at least from my perspective), the church in question has decided to go a different direction with their website, but this is one approach that I think would make our church websites more visitor-friendly.
Frank