There are two things that are absolutely essential to have clear and blazingly obvious on your church’s website:
- Details of service time/s and location/s
- Details of how to contact contact you
The first one is a no-brainer. If you want people to come to church, make sure you tell them when and where to come. However, you’d be surprised to see how often websites (and not just churches) make it difficult for people to contact them. Take a look at your own website, and consider it from the perspective of someone who has never visited your website – how easy is it to find contact details?
I’ve been checking out resources for churches who want to develop or re-develop their website and I’ve had a couple of very strange ‘contact’ experiences recently, that illustrate what not to do.
Firstly, on the contact page of one website was the following message:
Interesting.
Then as I started to complete the form with details of my query, this popped up:
Everything on this site was geared towards existing clients. Hopefully they have enough existing clients, because at the rate they’re going, they won’t be getting any new ones.
Secondly, the contact form for another website was ridiculously complex, and didn’t cater for my query which had nothing to do with the information they wanted to extract from me. They thought I had a question about building a specific website. I didn’t – I had a journalistic question about building websites in general.
Instead, I was forced to complete a lengthy form, where nearly all the fields were ‘required’, where I had to make up most of my responses because they wanted me to answer questions that just weren’t relevant to me.
Here is just half of the form I had to complete:
If my preference for contact is email, why does it matter what day and time of day you contact me? Why does it matter how many full-time and part-time staff work at the church? This hasn’t been thought through very well.
So, here are three fives for church websites when it comes to contact information:
- Make it very obvious on the homepage (and every other page, e.g. in the footer) how people can contact you.
- Don’t require that people provide information that isn’t necessary, or that they might not feel comfortable providing.
- Provide actual names of people they can call or email. Your church is a body of people, not an automated machine – don’t give the impression their email will just disappear into a bureaucratic black hole.
- Provide multiple contact opportunities. Don’t just give a phone number or email address. Provide people with both options – let them choose what’s most appropriate for them, rather than what suits you best.
- Finally, view your website from the perspective of a newcomer. Does the contact information (and everything else on your site) give an impression that you are glad that they are visiting, and that you welcome their communication with you? Or does it look like a club for members, and that you’d prefer they didn’t bother you?
