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Website Thinking – Part 2

By Ben ⋅ 1st Sep 2009 ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I’m sharing a few of the thoughts behind dundasanglican.com.au in the hope that they may be useful to someone.

I thought pretty hard about the top level structure of the site’s navigation. There were two principles for me:
1. I wanted to keep it lean. Previous attempts at making church websites have tended to spiral out of control and become bloated with content and this was reflected in an expanding navigation. Besides, the books say 5-7 links in your main nav is the ideal.

2. More Importantly: I want it to be a no brainer for users to work out where they need to click to have the question which drove them to the site answered.

So I decided on this:

  • HOME
  • NEW HERE?
  • SUNDAYS
  • WHATS ON
  • RESOURCES
  • CONTACT US

I’m sure you’re thinking that there’s nothing remarkable about that list, and there’s not. But there were a few I culled. Many sites have an ‘ABOUT US’ or ‘INFORMATION’ section, with content like staff profiles, the history of the church, or the church’s mission statement. I figured that kind of content is mainly relevant for new comers – seasoned attenders know what the senior minister looks like, so I put (some of) that stuff in the ‘NEW HERE?’ section.

I’ve also seen a lot of ‘MINISTRIES’ pages on church websites. This is where all the groups and activities which meet during the week get a plug. I just felt that the term ‘MINISTRIES’ could be pretty opaque to a visitor. I toyed with GROUPS, or ACTIVITIES, but in the end I decided to rename my CALENDAR Page ‘WHATS ON’ and lump all that in together.

This is also why I didn’t call the SUNDAYS page ‘SERVICES’. While we do run church services on Sundays, I think in interweb land Services are things that a company like NRMA offers their customers.

Now, when I think back to my three users and imagine their questions, I think it’s pretty clear what to click on.

The local not-yet-member
What time is church on Sunday? (SUNDAYS)
What’s this church going to be like? (NEW HERE?)
What’s the phone number of the church office? (CONTACT US)
Where is the church? (The map is on the ‘CONTACT US’ page and I think this might be a problem with my set up)

The Church member
What time does that men’s event start again? (WHATS ON)
I missed church last week and want to catch up on the sermon. (RESOURCES)

The Christian From Another Place
I’ve heard that Alan Lukabyo is a gun preacher, where can I listen to his gear? (RESOURCES)

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Discussion

7 comments for “Website Thinking – Part 2”

  1. Posted by Mikey Lynch | 1st Sep 2009, 8:25 am

    Great stuff man, very helpful.

    A couple of niggles/matters of taste:

    1. I’m not so sure about renaming ‘Services’ to ‘Sundays’, I don’t think the ambiguity is that extreme, as we are still used to the different meaning of ’services’ in a religious context – ‘memorial service’ and so on. I also don’t like the emphasis on the one day of the week that ‘Sundays’ gives. I’d probably just go for ‘When and Where’ or something like that.

    2. Does ‘Contact Us’ need to be a primary link in quite this way? Can’t it live as a footer to the web page?

  2. Posted by Ben | 1st Sep 2009, 8:35 am

    Thanks for the thoughts Mikey,

    I’m collecting all the feedback I get and I plan to go through it all when I do a 3 month review… so I really appreciate it.

  3. Posted by Astrid | 2nd Sep 2009, 4:28 pm

    I think its good to think about how outsiders may percieve things. When I went ‘church shopping’ I found that the websites were designed for christians who know the whats what of church.

    Like the 10 beliefs – it was good for me but it would be interesting to take some of these to the street to see what normal people would think of them.

  4. Posted by Ben Hudson | 2nd Sep 2009, 4:36 pm

    Hey Astrid – yep, good call on the beliefs… I just stole them from AFES – it would definitely be worth doing some work on that page.

    cheers

  5. Posted by Tim Hu | 5th Sep 2009, 5:23 pm

    Really nice site Ben! A side question: did you use modx mentioned a while ago on this blog?

  6. Posted by Ben Hudson | 5th Sep 2009, 5:36 pm

    Thanks Tim,

    yeah MODx is my CMS of choice at the moment. Let me know if you want a demo.

  7. Posted by Tim Hu | 8th Sep 2009, 1:19 pm

    I’ve installed MODx and fiddled a little.

    It looks cleaner and simpler than, say, Joomla. But slightly mysterious to me is how the resources are ‘hooked up’ at the frontend display.

    I’ll bug you for a demo when college starts again.

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