Most of the focus of our Church Marketing Online University articles to this point has been on things you can do to bring people who are looking for a church to your church website.  But once a person comes to your church website for the first time, what happens next?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote 10 Things Church Website Visitors Need to See, which describe the design elements important to making a visitors experience on your church website a good one.  In this article, we look at the information first-time visitors to your church website are looking for.

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I was reading through some articles about church websites and came across one at Church Marketing Perspective that I thought made a great point and fit well with our current series of articles about church website design. The article, “Commandment 8 - Thou shalt be relevant and changing”, talks about the need for every church website to be constantly changing. Change is a part of life and our church websites need to change as well.

No church website has been effective with information that is 3 years old:
If you haven’t updated your church’s website in the past 6 months, then it’s probably out of date and not very useful to visitors. If you haven’t changed the information on your church website for more than 6 months and the information is still accurate, then you aren’t using the website to its full potential. Read more…

Dean Peters posted an excellent article over at Heal Your Church Website today – lessons derived from his office vending machine - about the importance of using website analytics with a church website.  Website analytics are statistics that tell you all sorts of useful information including which pages are most popular, what search phrases people used to find your website, and more.

Most web hosting packages provide some sort of statistics, but a great way to get very detailed analytics for free is with Google Analytics.

The bottom line is… when it comes to websites and snack machines – it’s important to give people what’s important to them rather than offering what’s important to you. 

According to a new study published today by The Barna Group, churches continue to lag behind in their use of Internet technology.

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