6 Ways to Design an Elegant and Intuitive Church Website

When looking for a potential new church website, it is so important to demo that software and make sure that it's going to be as easy to use as you hope it is.

I want to give you six tips on what to look for when demoing a new website. 

1. A simple interface 

And with that I mean that is not cluttered. This is the interface you're going to be looking at for years to come with your new website.

So is it easy on the eyes?

Are there too many things that make it really confusing?

This is not necessarily about just you, but also consider if other volunteers or staff members in your church are going to be easily able to come in and make the changes they want to. So we're looking for simplicity over complexity.

2. Intuitive 

Can you naturally find out where you need to go in the software to make the changes you want to, or does it feel like there's often too many steps involved? Do you have to constantly reference a knowledge base to figure out how to get there? Those little bits of confusion are just going to cause a lot of pain for people over the years. So we want to make sure it's easy to use and intuitive in the way you hope it would be.

3. Photos, sermons and events should be really easy to add to the website 

Those are the things you're going to be on there all the time doing, adding a new photo to a page or adding sermons. A lot of poor software can make those steps quite complex where there's different software you need to use to upload a sermon file. Extra steps like that are unnecessary. You want to make sure those things are really simple to do. You need to ask yourself, " where do I go to do that and can I do it easily?"

4. Files need to be easy to upload

This is similar to what I was saying about photos. How do you upload a PDF of a registration, or of a poster, or anything like that? Are those steps really easy to do? This is something you are going to do pretty often so you do not want it to be challenging or complicated. 

5. You do not want to have to do code

This is a big one. Code is changing all the time, but also so many church leaders and staff members and volunteers just don't have a background in code. If I find that there's something on a website that requires knowledge of code, I would definitely raise a red flag at that moment. There's kind of this thing called the no-code movement now, where we're trying to make it so that websites are just incredibly, incredibly simple for anybody to use. That would be one thing I would have on your checklist; is code necessary for this website? And if it is, stay away.

6. Does the website pass the Grandma test? 

Could you put this website in front of your grandmother and have her actually go and make the necessary changes? You don't want there to have to be some superior level of technology needed to edit your website. Remember to ask yourself, is it intuitive? 

Show Notes

Read the full blog of this episode here: https://get.tithe.ly/blog/pick-church-website-platform

Today on Modern Church Leader, Tithe.ly Sites team lead Matthew Morrison gives church leaders 6 tips for choosing the right website platform for their churches.

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