What’s Next? at effective web ministry notes

What’s Next?

filed under Response, Strategy by jerry on 30Jan07 @ 9:54 am EST

EveryStudent.com was built primarily to answer students’ questions about who God is and what it might be like to know Him. God began using the site to draw large numbers of people to faith so Marilyn Adamson, the site’s director, built another site, startingwithGod.com.

This site has all of what a new believer needs to know about their faith and provides information and the opportunity to get involved in a local church or Campus Crusade for Christ group. During the last few months we have begun thinking about how we can do a better job of building up new believers in their faith.

During an average month on EveryStudent.com, about 3,000 people indicate a first time decision to trust Jesus. Of these 3,000, about 500 each month were going to the follow-up site, startingwithGod.com. In November we improved how EveryStudent.com introduces the follow-up site, and the number of people going there after making a decision for Christ doubled! Over 30% of these new believers (over 1,000 each month) are starting to grow in their faith right away on this site now. This is exciting.

Jesus described what happens in the souls of people when they hear the gospel (Mark 4). This parable of the sower, therefore, informs much of what we do on the EveryStudent.com team. One of the final comments Jesus made in that parable was that the seed which fell on good soil produced lots of other fruit, “multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times.”

As we encourage students to grow in their faith on startingwithGod.com, we want to always give them an opportunity to tell their friends about their new faith, too. Most personal evangelism happens in the first year of a new believer’s life, so we want to give them opportunities to do this right away. On the first follow up page on EveryStudent.com and on the first page of startingwithGod.com there is a link to do just that.

Pray that God will continue working in the hearts of new believers through startingwithGod.com.

2 Responses to “What’s Next?”

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1 Jayson on Jan 30th, 2007 said:

I do love these sites and am whole-hearted at promoting them (mostly ES.com), but they are both in desperate need of a re-design (swG.com moreso than ES.com). One of the consistent holdbacks to me delving very far into a site that I’m not familiar with is a design that is either hard on my eyes or with a user-unfriendly interface. The visual design may be shallow and definitely unfortunate, but I’m sure it’s the case for others as well. It would be unfortunate, if that’s the case, that students would miss out on the content for the sake of the design.

For example, my guess is that more students would be likely to visit the very Web2 design of eBible.com than Bible Gateway even if BG has a more thorough search feature just because of the simple Google-esque design of the front page. I realize that it’s less than possible with our sites because of the amount of content, but even some updated stock photos would be a good start.

I’m not sure if was you who designed the sites, and if it was I don’t mean this to come off harsh at all - they were very good design when ES came out, but aesthetic of the web has changed significantly since then.

I’m ranting, sorry. Just some feedback.
2 jerry on Jan 31st, 2007 said:

Yes, the graphics on both these sites is definitely vintage 1999, although we updated the EveryStudent.com look a couple years ago.

Here is why I don’t think it is a major factor on EveryStudent.com.

If you have the right marketing strategy, the visual appeal of the site is far less important. Remember, Google brings a majority of our visitors to EveryStudent.com - through simple ads (four lines of text on a white background) or search results on a very plain page.

An analogy: Selling fishing supplies in Florida is going to work better than selling fishing supplies in Arizona (at least around the desert). The packaging on the lures is really insignificant next to this consideration.

Our conclusion: The effectiveness of online marketing dwarfs other factors.

While graphics might affect return visits, EveryStudent.com is not designed for return visits. That is not the goal of the site.

So graphic presentation has not been the highest priority on EveryStudent.com, and we have seen consistently strong response.

On the other hand, these factors are not as true of startingwithGod.com. And it has also not received much of our attention prior to just recently when we created a team to work on this whole approach (rather than a single person). Maybe this will be a factor we change as we learn about what is effective on this site.

Thanks for the comment.