My Top 25 church website design tips

Listed below are my Top 25 church website design tips. They are based on my review of 14,000 church and parish websites to date. The tips, while numbered, are not in any special order — that is, they are not ranked in any way.

Listing 1 to 5 of 25 total

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#	Tip / Reason or comment
1	Don't include a splash screen or an intro page on your site. That is, don't have an intro page that requires or allows visitors to "Enter" or "Skip intro," such as the one shown at right. Splash screens and intro pages are outdated techniques that waste bandwidth and waste user mouse clicks. (The most important content on your site should be reachable in three mouse clicks or less.) Here's another, particularly audacious example of a splash screen: www.thehopeconnection.org. (However, the designer of the site had the good sense to program a browser cookie to be set so that the splash screen is bypassed the second time someone visits the site.) There is one legitimate use for a splash screen, however, and that's when you need an inviting-looking home page that provides paths to several different related sites. One example would be a situation where a church runs a Christian school. The home page or splash screen, then, would include links to the church's website and to the school's website. Another example is the home page of Mountain Lake Church of Cumming, Georgia. The church's home page provides paths to a "Visitors & Newcomers" version of the site, a "Members & Attenders" version of the site, and a third site for church planters. Pleasant View Baptist Church of Port Deposit, Maryland, does something similar.
2	Don't make an all Flash website. Don't make visitors wait for your site to download every time they visit it. Don't make them scroll down to see the last three lines of a block of text. (That "dinosaur" — as one designer disparagingly called it — known as HTML has the amazing ability to dynamically accommodate any amount of text vertically because the webpage can expand vertically.) Don't make them squint to read text on your all Flash site because you set the text to 8 point font size and gave visitors no way to increase the size. Instead, make your site with HTML and embed Flash movies to do what Flash does best: animations and audio/video. (But see next item, too.)
3	Don't make visitors to your church website see the same animations over and over again in Flash movies. Figure out a way, using cookies and/or session variables, to turn off your fancy animations (once you've impressed visitors with your incredible skills and talent) and stop wasting visitors' time. They've come for information.
4	Don't use frames. Frames have fallen out of favor among website designers, and further, cause problems for the screen readers that blind people use to browse websites. Here's an example website. Notice that the bottom right quadrant scrolls up and down, while the top and left stay put. That's done with "frames." Now, you might think there's some merit to this concept, and indeed there is. However, just trust me when I say that use of frames is out of date. Don't do it.
5	In menus, don't use buttons — beveled, oval, square, arty, etc., especially buttons separated by some space (see example at right). This is an outdated technique. Use text links instead, as much as possible. Text links download quickly, and can be read by the screen readers that blind people use to browse websites.

Listing 1 to 5 of 25 total

Website last updated: 6 December 2009 | Email: David Gillaspey