Re-Thinking Church Websites - The User Experience | Innovating Tomorrow

When any visitor goes to a church website they are, typically, in store for one kind of experience whether they are a seasoned member of your church or someone who just has questions about spirituality and the church. In our effort to meet the needs of the people and help the church with the mission it's time for us to re-think our website user experience. Let's look at how we can make this experience a targeted experience that meets the needs of the user while working for the mission of the church and the good of the kingdom.

3 Types of Users

Church websites have 3 types of users and the experiences of each of these types of users should be quite different from the rest.

First, we have a user who is just exploring the church, Christianity, and God. This is someone who is unchurched and doesn't know many of the things Christians take for granted. They may have herd about Jesus but they don't know much more than he is a historical person who lived.

For this type of user we need to be careful about the words we use and things we assume they know. We can't use typical church words. We can't assume they know anything about the church besides what they may have herd on the news.

The first step for this user shouldn't be to just invite them to the church and give them the address and time of our worship services. For them, the worship services won't mean a whole lot. If you're thinking of using your worship services as evangelism recent research tells us we should rethink this. We have our church website, the user has come there, let's engage them right from the start on the website.

This type of user is looking to learn. They aren't looking to engage in the community, yet. This is an opportunity for us to teach and to treat this type of user as a student. More on this in the next post.

The next type of user is a Christian looking for a church home. This could be someone who moved, someone who was part of a church family that died off, someone who is looking to come back to the church, or someone who is new to Christianity. This is a next step for that unchurched first type of person and a first step for someone looking to become part of the church.

This type of person is looking for details on the service times, the types of teaching the church has, and information about the church community. This is where the typical information found on a church website should go. But, it should be laid out in a completely different manner.

The last type of user we have is someone who is part of the church community. This is someone who should be a student, a minister to people in need, and someone who is an interacting part of the church community. This is the third step for someone who started out unchurched but has grown into the faith, a second step for someone checking out the church, and a step that every Internet user of the church should be at.

Members of the church community here should experience community directed by the mission of the church. There should be places for them to grow in their faith, grow in missional living, and do it with others all 7 days of the week.

Variations

The 3 types of user that I describe don't fit everyone. There are situations where someone who is unchurched is looking to check out the church itself and not learn about God. But, we can't make a site that holds to all variations of the types of people we may have coming to our site.

As we get into identifying the type of user and guiding them though the site to the information they are looking for we can account for most of these variations.

Identify The Type Of User

Before we can display the unique kinds of information someone is looking for we need to know which kind of user they are. Someone going to your church website who is unchurched being directed to a community part of your site isn't going to help them. The first step we need to do is identify the type of user they are. I'd start with having the church homepage be a place that starts guiding the user. Think of something like the wire frame diagram below.

The first thing we have on the homepage is something that helps our new user find what they are looking for. The goal is to guide them. So, if a user if following the track of someone who is learning about God, faith, and the church in general there should be something to help them go to the next step of being a church visitor. And, if someone is a church visitor there should be something on that track to lead them to become part of the church community.

In the questions we are asking in the wireframe body above we aren't asking them what kind of user they are. The lines can easily be blurred and many users won't understand what that means. Instead we ask them about the kinds of information they are looking for. The goal is to approach this as a user of the site.

You'll, also, notice in the header we have something to help people jump to different parts of the site based on the type of user they are. Some people will know what type of user they are, like visitors and members. This provides the freedom for people to jump around the site and for those who know they are a member to quickly get to the members area.

To help with your regular church community something to think about is a sub-domain or separate part of the site for them. So each time they come to the site they don't have to go through the starting flow. Think of having a community.yourchurchsite.org. A page they can bookmark, get to from the homepage, and be a members first stop once they don't need the same type of guided experience someone new needs.

A Changed Focus

This is all about a change in focus with this style of website. The goal is not to show them our stuff. The goal is to guide them to what it is they are looking for. At the same time, this type of website compliments how Christ called us to do the mission of the church.

Next up we look at the unchurched users experience and dream about what it could be.