Tag Archive - church websites

Is the gospel absent from your church website?

April 29, 2010 in for Churches, Pastors

I read this post and came away challenged. Here’s the guts of it:

“Many church web sites are technically advanced, aesthetically pleasing and provide a lot of information, but I find that very few make an attempt to actually present the Gospel. Those that do are often woeful in expressing the central components of the Gospel (leaving key ingredients out) or else it is packaged in such strange sounding religious jargon that the uninformed would find it very difficult to understand.”

It’s a good point, don’t you think?

Does your church website present the gospel? Is it presented in a way that someone who is unfamiliar with the gospel can actually understand? Feel free to pass on a link to show others how your church is doing this.

I’m also going to think about how to do this best on my church’s website.

Thanks to David McKay for passing on the link.

Image credit: madmaven.

Stay or flee. How do these websites make you feel?

April 27, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

I’ve been reviewing tools that can be used by churches and ministries to monitor what’s being said about them online. More on that soon.

As I’ve been conducting the reviews, I’ve looked at over 30 websites. I’ve noticed that different websites evoke different feelings in me, and in return, my desires to either continue exploring, or leave as soon as I can.

There’s this site, for the Alterian SM2 product. How do you feel when you visit its website?

I feel stressed. The homepage is busy, the background is novel but confusing, and I don’t know where to look, or where to start. It might be a great product, but the homepage is a real turn-off and I’m not interested in exploring further.

On the other hand, Social Mention evokes an entirely different response. How do you feel when you visit its website?

I feel calm. It’s uncluttered. There’s lot of white space. The messages are clear. The value is obvious.

Alterian could be a superior product. But its website has pushed me away, rather than drawn me in.

How do visitors feel when they visit your church or ministry website? What impact does it have on them? Do they want to stay or flee?

Add a ‘Review’ tab to your church’s Facebook page?

April 21, 2010 in Social Media

One of the common elements I’m discovering on the Facebook pages of organisations is a reviews tab. It looks like this:

The reviews tab allows the user to write a review, and give the product/brand a star rating out of five.

Some of the organisations using this facility include:

Here’s what I’m wondering – if your church or ministry on Facebook, would you add a reviews tab? Do the benefits outweigh the risks?

Lesson from the Deputy PM – be careful how you interpret website data

April 15, 2010 in for Churches

(This post was originally published at Sydney Anglicans)

Julia Gillard (Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister) has been quoting the number of visits the My School website and using these visits as the basis of some determined policy decisions. On ABC1′s Insiders on Sunday, she said:

“If we look at the My School website, Barrie, the current statistics are we’ve had around 2.7 million visits. We’ve had 140 million pages of the My School website looked at.”

Ms Gillard then makes the following conclusion:

“Parents have literally voted with their fingertips in extraordinary numbers because they want this information.”

The Deputy Prime Minister has looked at the statistics (2.7 million visits sounds like a lot), and made some conclusions about what Australian parents want. Statistics should be able to help us come to educated conclusions. However, statistics can be interpreted in many different ways, and website statistics need to be considered in context. For example, the following should be considered when looking at the raw data.

Of the 2.7 million visits to the site:

  • how many visits were by Australians?
  • how many visits were by parents?
  • how many of the visits were by the media, or the website developers, or the usability testers, or Education Department officials?
  • how many of the visits were unique (i.e. was it one person visiting the site 2.7 million times?! Obviously not, but what are the actual proportions?)
  • how many of the page views were unique? (i.e. how many different people viewed the 140 million pages?)

This post isn’t political commentary – it’s drawing up some lessons for churches and Christian ministries. And so the lessons here for our websites are simple:

  1. consider statistics in context – raw data means very little on its own.
  2. beware of making conclusions based off one or two website metrics.
  3. set-up filters (to prevent staff traffic from being included in the statistics and muddying the waters).

To learn more about the differences between page views, visits and visitors, check out this 4 minute tutorial.

Make your WordPress website mobile-friendly

April 13, 2010 in for Churches

Make it easy for people to view your site on their iPhone or other mobile device.

Install the WPTouch iPhone Theme.

It’s super-easy to configure, and will serve your visitors well.

For example, this is what a post on Communicate Jesus looks like on my iPhone:

And this is what the homepage looks like:

If you don’t use WordPress, you might like to check out:

Resources to learn how to use Google Analytics

April 13, 2010 in for Churches

As far as website analytics goes, Google Analytics is advanced. It’s free, which is great, but just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s straightforward to use.

When I chat to people about the analytics they are collecting on their website, it’s not uncommon to hear “We’ve got Google Analytics installed, but we don’t really look at it”. Not surprisingly, if you don’t take the time to learn Google Analytics (or any other analytics program you’ve got running on your website), you won’t be able to make the most of it.

If you’re after a less complicated solution, for my money (slightly more than the cost of Google Analytics), Clicky is the winner. It’s simple, easy to use and cheap (but not free). I’ve written about its benefits previously.

However, Google Analytics is the industry standard. ‘27 features that make Google Analytics best of breed‘ might be three years old, but it still applies and then some, with even more features added since.

Here are some resources to learn more about Google Analytics so it can be more than just code you’ve got running in the background of your site!

My first recommendation is to go to ‘Conversion University’ and take lessons in Google Analytics IQ. These short tutorials provide a beginners overview to Google Analytics, what it is, what it does, and how you can set it up. If you’re brave, you can then do the test!

I also recommend checking out the following:

Is your church or ministry using Google Analytics on its website? Do you feel like you are making the most of it?

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