Your target audience

Who is your site for? Internal or external?

When thinking about your site, its structure and its content, this is arguably the most important question to ask yourself. There aren’t any right or wrong answers to this question - not inherently anyway. But if you set up your site based on internal structures, roles or needs, you can’t then be surprised when people on the outside looking in aren’t engaged by what they find. So with that in mind, here’s another way of asking tat question…

Is your site primarily about communicating to your existing Church members, or is it about reaching out to people outside your Church with whom you don’t currently have a relationship?

The shop front

Often, the answer is “both.” So how do we structure a site in a way to cater for both? It maybe helpful to apply the analogy of a shop front. The window of a high-street shop is largely designed to get passers-by to walk through their door. It’s about presenting potential patrons with an enticing view of what they might find within. It’s about showing them a little of everything such that no matter who they are, they’ll see something that might be relevant to them.

Once they are through the door though, the presentation shifts. The ownness then falls on the patron to find what they are looking for using the way-finding devices the shop owner makes available to them. At that stage though, the patron has bought-into the shop, they are through the door, and the way the shop owner communicates with them changes.

The same applies with the people your church has relationship with. If your website as a whole is the shop, then its homepage is its shop-front. Your Church members are the patrons who have already bought into you and so you can afford to communicate with them differently. Viewing the homepage of your site, it’s quite easy weight it in favour of the person outside looking in, while structuring the deeper content in favour of those already inside looking out.

80/20

Consider a 80/20 split. On the homepage, 80% of your content could be focussed on the passer-by, presenting them with snippets of who you are, where and when you meet, and possibly ways into both your Church body, and the website. The other 20% then gives your congregation easy access to the content they are looking for, the nuts and bolts of church life which passers-by would not be so concerned with.

But once you get past the homepage, the split flips-over; 20% of the depth of your content deals directly with the core of the gospel and the needs of people outside your Church, while 80% deals with notices, meetings, downloadable rota PDFs etc.

This way, you grab the attention of people who might be looking to your website for a flavour of who you are and/or interested in what you believe; while simultaneously catering for the day-to-day needs of your congregation who will be more inclined to click furth into the site to find what they are looking for.

Bottom-up or top-down?

Another theme to consider is who the subject of the content is. Is your site’s structure built around the user and the needs that they might come to the site with (bottom-up) or is it about your Church and what you want to communicate to the user (top-down)?

User needs

A bottom-up approach puts the user in the driving seat of their experience. It puts areas of content about their experience front and center, while content that’s overtly about your organisation’s agendain the periphery. At the front end of the site might ask the user questions like how can we help you? Or what would you like to know?

It’s all about allowing them to find the information they are after organically, and then using secondary mechanisms to subtly communicate the message you’d like them to leave with.

And that’s the risk with this pathway; a bottom-up approach always runs the risk that the user walks away with the information they need, but not the message you wanted to leave them with.

Organisation message

A top-down approach guides users through the message you want to deliver, and then relates the user’s needs to that message. So it’s “we have a heart to serve the community, which is why we run a free Mothers and Toddlers drop-in” as opposed to the bottom-up “Come to our free Mothers and Toddlers drop-in which we run because we want to share God’s love with our community.”

The risk here is that it can sometimes feel heavy-handed and inward-looking. It’s possible that users miss the services you might be inviting them to, because it’s addressed through a framework that address the organisation first and obscures the user’s pathway into it.

Best practice

As with other areas here, the tipping point will be somewhere between the two and different for everyone. However the predominant trend today is to lean towards a “user needs” approach, pulling in elements of overt organisation messaging where a clear direction is required.

So, where does this lead us?

The key thing is to have a clear view on who your website is targeted at, what information you have that they might need, and some thoughts on how you might balance those needs with the message you want to communicate. The next thing to do, is start to assemble the bones of your site.