Audience 

You actually might have three audiences, so in fact you might need three websites. That is easier than you think, and we will look at that in another article.

First you want to define who will be using or viewing your church website. These might be:

• Your Church Members
• The general public
• Members of eldership, or deacons, or teachers/youth leaders.

The specific functionality will be different for each of these, but the general design can be the same.

Design Guidelines

A Church website will normally be oriented to a slightly older group and to people that are looking for information. The best design gives this to the audience!

Here are some Do's and Don't's:

     Do:

• keep it simple - do not clutter any one page
• make it clear that the audience is in the right spot - make your Church name or the objective of the site clear!
• put the most important information on the top left - that is where we naturally look first

     Don't:

• make the header too big
• make the images too large (in file size)
• make the text too small
• clutter up the front page with everything!

Design Do's

Keep it Simple This is relative of course, and one of the reasons why you need to define your audience. With your audience in mind, you will know what they are likely looking for and you can include that information right there where they can easily find it - if it is short!

If the relevant information is fairly long, then just put the highlights, or even just a short intro, and then link to the internal page or tab that has the full information.

Make it Clear the Person is in the Right Location
Be sure to make it obvious that the person who has browsed to your site has arrived at the right spot! This could be an image of your church - if the site is for Church Members. Otherwise it should include the name of your church in a clearly seen manner.

If this is a separate site or a sub-domain for your Committees, that should be clear as well. So your church image and a clearly visible title that notes this site is for Committees.

Key Information in the top left
Western-oriented audiences read things left to right and top to bottom. This includes your website!

So under your logo or header and just to the left of your navigation (if you have navigation on the left), put the most important information for your visitor. This should include a title or something that confrims the visitor is at the right location and the start of the main information they will be seeking. Agian re-emphasizing the ned to define your audience, but you knew that already!

Design Don'ts

Don't Make a Large Header Keep your Header and Logo at the top of the website relatively small. Visitors come for information, not to look at a full-screen image of your church, even if it is a beautiful church!

Especially since the Header area is normally present at the top of all your pages, you want to keep that section relatively small. You don't want the visitor constatntly scrolling down to get the information they are looking for.

Don't Have Large Image Files
All good website builders will ensure your image files are not too large. Large files really slow down the laoding of the web page for visitors. The biggest files are usually imnages.

So any images you have should be relatively small and there should not be too many on any one page. And they will be of type Gif or Jpg. These two types are common and they provide relatively small file sizes for any images.

Don't Use Small Text Sizes
Unless you have a site specifically for the younger crowd, don't make the text size the smallest size. Even if we're middle-aged, it is relatively hard to try reading information that is all in small text all the time.
You might have side-note type of information in smaller tesxt, but the bulk of the text should be large enough for your particular audience.

Conclusion

So for your church website, you want to ensure you are giving the visitor the information they are looking for - so you start off by defining your audience! Then you make it clear to the visitor that they have landed on the right page and it is easy for them to find the information they are looking for.