Piggybacking on my last post, I wanted to spend a little time looking at some other ways that we can cause our church website to be less effective. After all, it's better that we learn from the mistakes of others than have to make them all ourselves.

• Full Frontal Assault – Also known as overwhelming your visitors with information on your homepage. We need to make sure that we plan our site layouts not only in terms of where information appears on a page, but hierarchically (where links to more detailed information are located and lead to). Sometimes we need to ask ourselves if everything really needs to go on the first page, or can it be better placed elsewhere.
• Hide & Seek – We need to make sure that information is not only available, but easily and logically reachable. If they can't get to key information in 2-3 clicks, then your visitors may just stop trying.
• A Little Bit Of Everything – I know we all like to think of our church websites as important (and they are), but sometimes we lose site of how important they are in peoples' daily lives. I've seen a few webmasters try to make their websites a portal/startpage with local weather reports, sports scores and news headlines on their homepage. While it works for a general audience, like Yahoo, there's a very good chance that those aren't the things that most visitors to your church website are looking for.
• Now That's Flashy – Don't get me wrong, Flash and Javascript functionality can help make a website very inviting. However, let's not forget that not everyone has Flash installed, nor does everyone have Javascript enabled. Make sure your website is still useable to these folks. And you'll need to check it yourself, because it's highly unlikely that they'll let you know they had trouble with your site.

As always, there's lots to consider when working on our church websites. When working, try to get feedback from a range of people, including other webmasters and general web users. Chances are, if you ask their opinion, they'll be more than happy to share it.