The Seven Deadly Sins of Church WebSite Design

here are six things the user hates, seven things that are an abomination to his browser:

1. Building Worship
2. Yelling All The Time
3. Serpent Stew
4. Gimmicks, Gizmos And Animated GIFS.
5. TMI == Too Much Information
6. Cruft
7. Distractingly Disorganized

Having now laid hands on some 200 church web sites in the form of usually-constructive criticism at HealYourChurchWebsite.com, and having viewed thousands of other church websites as possible victims subjects, I’ve come up with my own catalog of common mistakes that often minimize the effectiveness and impact of a church website; or what I like to refer to as “The Seven Deadly Sins of Church WebSite Design”

Read along with me and see if your church or charity’s web presence isn’t about to run off the information highway and into the perdition of website sin:

A church website that fails to convey the purpose and personality of the congregation and staff will also fail to bring new members into the door. One sure way to avoid such failures is to resist the temptation to make your home page a shrine to your big lifeless church building.

No matter how much money you spent on your building program, most online images of bricks and mortar convey a sense of lifelessness. Worse yet, I’ve seen more than one instance where an image of a church building means “a sense of place” to the church Webmaster, while conveying something “slightly different” to a first time visitor.

Best example of this is the website for the Collinsville Baptist ‘Empty Parking’ Lot Tabernacle - a website whose front page unleashes on the unsuspecting user a 211kb image of a very symmetric building during the middle of the day with absolutely nobody home. Moreover, the stark white color, the faded-black parking lot, the emphasis on lines, and exactly centered boundaries shouts to me “come and behold the enormity of our emptiness” or perhaps “come to the mothership, resistance if futile!”

Not exactly the sort of message one should convey if they want to get people in the door.

rule of thumb #1: unless your holding services at the Monastery at Petra, leave the pix of the bricks for your ‘directions’ page.

One of the most important lessons I learned while studying opera was that forte passages have more impact if you surround them with piano phrases. In English, the loud stuff sounds really, really loud if you’re singing everything else in a quiet whisper.

The same is true with the printed word. While it is important that at some level our websites boldly proclaim the good news …

In an exercise of contrast and comparison, here are two pages that both that deal with the facts surrounding the resurrection. However one page gets a bit noisy and induces some rather tedious eye-strain with attempts to “help” the facts along with over-used bold titles, lots of centered all-cap exclamations, and other acts of promiscuous text. The other lets the facts speak for themselves - you decide which:

• Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Fiction? by Rusty Wright
• Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Fact or Fiction by Dr. Terry Watkins

rule of thumb #2: leave the yelling to someone whose image is enhanced by such yelling; like Strong Bad (Flash required)!

“If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?” - Luke 11:11 KJV

When someone visits your website, they usually fall into one of two categories. First time visitors, perhaps seeking a new church home, and repeat visitors in need of scheduling and/or contact information, and perhaps even to consume a sermon or two.

As simple as these needs are, I have found countless church websites that fail to put on their front page the times and location of their services. Many of these same sites also fail to provide an easy to find email address and/or phone number. Almost as if to say: “… come visit our church - if you can find us.”

rule of thumb #3: don’t let your visitors wander in the wilderness, provide the obvious information they seek up-front (or at least provide a conspicuous link to it).

I don’t know about you, but to me the Cross is an ‘emblem suffering and shame,‘ which is why I find the spinning animated version of it so offensive. It not only trivializes what happened to our Lord on that painful day, but it also makes your church website look cheap.

So do ’special effects’ such as cursor trailers, pop-up windows, scrolling marquees and Flash-intros. Yes, they may look slick the first time and all your geek buddies will think you’re cool, but such contrivances quickly become annoying hindrances to individuals who are actually in need of some compelling content.

Don’t get me wrong - don’t be afraid to use various technologies, just make sure there is a legitimate need.

rule of thumb #4: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

rule of thumb 4.a.: you’re not allowed to have a spinning gif of a gold lamé cross on your website unless you have the same atop the roof of your church!

Now that you’ve removed the Flash intro that pictured your church with a spinning cross on top, you also need to get rid of information that compromises the privacy and security of your congregation.

For example, while I think photos of smiling faces are better than lifeless bricks, I also know that we live in a world of predators, so any images of children I post on my own church’s website come from a stock photo CD instead of my congregation.

Similarly, blindly cutting and pasting what’s in the church bulletin to the church website may expose a church member’s phone number or home address.

It is also why I suggest to church web servants to avoid posting email addresses online. Nothing says “we don’t care about you” like inviting spammers to hammer away at your faithful.

I’ve written about this topic in greater detail over on my own blog in an article entitled ‘Why your Church needs a Privacy Statement.’

rule of thumb #5: when in doubt, leave it out - at least until you can get explicit permission.

The HyperDictionary defines cruft as “An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft …” I use this term to when discussing some of the dust that gathers about church websites. Usually this comes in the form of outdated schedules, broken links and abandoned content.

I realize maintenance is a dirty 11-letter word that none of us want to deal with, but failure to schedule regular updates is sure way to tell seekers you’re not serious about what you do.

It also makes your website a waste of time an talent as frustrated church members wind-up calling your church office asking for information that was supposed to be online … so people wouldn’t call the church office so often with requests for simple information.

rule of thumb #6: content management is cheap and easy when you employ a blogging system.

If it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to build a church website, then it shouldn’t take one to navigate it. Think about it in terms of football, specifically an offensive lineman. You never know he’s there until he blows an assignment or commits a penalty. The same is true with your website’s navigation.

It should be so intuitive that it requires no instruction, so obvious it requires no guessing, and so simple that it gets a person from point A to point B in a single click.

The only way this happens is by organizing your information into a sensible outline, then using common conventions such as menus, search forms and site maps to help visitor quickly find their way around your site, and hopefully through the doors of your church; preferably on Sunday.

If you’re unsure on how to make this all work, then see if you can get a hold of a used copy of Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” Though a bit dated now, its advice on structuring and implementing your navigation is timeless - and easy to understand.

rule of thumb #7: random experiences are for computer games, not your church’s online message - provide easy-to-read and use navigation.

If perhaps I’ve mentioned something your currently doing on your church website, don’t panic. You should have seen my first attempt a church website, it wasn’t pretty. Fortunately I was able to destroy most of the evidence before Google came into existence … but I digress.

Unlike when I started my crusade to “teach, rebuke, correct & train in righteous web design” back in May of 2002, there are now a host of websites by technical capable Christians who are more than willing to help you repent of your sinful webmastery and get your church’s Internet presence back into the good graces of God, your seekers and your congregation - in that order.

Seek them out, read their lessons, be doers of what they say - or at least go visit my current series on the 12 Days of Jesus Junk so we can all laugh about our mistakes.

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