Bells, Whistles and Content...Oh My!
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.
Re: "A Little Bit of Everything"
I've had to come to terms with this as part of my day job. A few years ago, the college home page was a http://web.archive.org/web/20030328001729/http://w..." title="Connections@HFCC Circa March 2003">competition for position. Design of this page was eventually taken over by a marketing firm, and all information that could be useful to current students, faculty and staff was immediately removed. (Okay, it wasn't quite that bad. I kinda overreacted at the time.)
Out of these transitions, I began to understand that an organization's main web site needs to be outreach oriented, while information for existing constituents may best be placed on a portal. Granted, with the current wealth of CMS systems out there, it can be possible (even easy) to provide both of these functions on the same server, but I believe they still can have different navigation, focus, and even appearance. (I prefer my portals rather stark in appearance. Save the eye candy for the public side.)
But here's the interesting part: Every generation of the portal I've created at work has carried the mandate to contain weather, and - if possible - news and stock ticker information. In other words "make it look like my Yahoo!" The philosophy is that without these features, our users won't want to use this system on a daily basis. (I guess I forgot to mention in the recent discussion here about CMS and ChMS that for each CMS system I reviewed, I also had to figure out if it had a working weather gadget, or if I could at least make one!)
The problem is, they don't want to use it because those are essentially the only features that work, and they can already get it through my Yahoo! I guess it goes to show that useful, reliable, relevant and current content are still king, regardless of your target audience.