When you undertake a redesign of your church website, there will obviously be many people who will be interested and probably even more who will have an opinion on what it should look like, include and when it should go live. 

From working with businesses and churches, we typically find that churches have longer website design approval timescales. This is understandable, given the commitments of many church volunteers, workers and the infrequency of church management committees. 

So I've joined the PCC (for the non anglicans this is basically the church management committee) and it's given me a new level of appreciate of the importance of helping church decision making. 

This blog talks through how to help ease your church website design and, regardless of your church approval process, these best practices will help communication all round!   

Firstly, is it bad to have a committee involved in the design process?

The following video illustrates the process of designing a stop sign when a committee gets involved. In brief, the initial design idea is for a basic red circle with a big white 'stop' in the middle. The committee gets involved and has input in the design resulting in a pretty but confusing stop sign which when in place on the road means that cars do not stop resulting in more car crashes. It's worth watching the video as you can see that the design input seems at face value relevant and helpful and it's not immediately obvious that the end result is going to be so bad.

With a website, it's less obvious that the end result is going to be quite so disastrous but it generally is. The main problem is that web design is something which is easy for everyone to have an opinion on, whether it be which colour to use or what size the type should be. However, experienced and trained web designers usually make these decisions on colour and size based on knowledge of usability studies, science of colour and statistics surrounding conversion rates. The amateur usually makes these decisions based on personal preference and could potentially render a website unusable by people who are visually impaired. 

It's worth bearing in mind too that every minute spent deciding on tiny details such as whether everyone prefers the font one pixel size larger or smaller is a minute too long when the new website design, even if not perfect, is better than the current church website. The tiny details are generally not hugely important compared to the big picture, and often existing websites are not mobile friendly, are slow to load, have little to no images, and look dated and unprofessional.

With Church Pages websites changes can be easily made when the new site is live so it is better to stay focused on the overall picture of getting a site live that is responsive and user-friendly and worry about tweaking later. Also we always recommend taking professional advice from our highly experienced and trained designers and not letting personal preference interfere with the decision making process.

So how do you ease the process of approving your church website design? 

1) Make choices before the website is commissioned to be designed

It's essential that you are clear on why you're having your church website redesigned, and what you want to achieve before you commission a partner to help with this. It's useful to write this down so that you can refer back to this, or avoid this being questioned in future. 

Here are the key choices to make before starting your church website design: 

• The purpose of the church website redesign 
• The amount you are going to spend (you may need to research some options here and bring this to your committee when you're making initial choices). We are often asked about templates and costs prior to a meeting to help all parties to be informed. 
• The deadline for the church website design i.e. when you'd like to go live. This can be very useful as it helps give a clear end in sight, and drives any tasks you may delegate along the way
• The individual you're going to make responsible for this. This is vital and we'll explore this more in (2) as it helps drive decision making.

From our side, we can help provide you with the information we'll need from you when you apply i.e. the content and images.

2) Choose one person to manage the website design from the beginning 

Why one person? It's important to have a key individual for us to liaise with throughout the design process so that there are not mixed messages, or wasted time redoing work for multiple people. That key individual can then delegate parts of the design to others however, they will remain the point of contact. 
From our side, we assign each church a key individual in our team (usually Heather!) to liaise with and this helps maintain good communication and clear instructions. 

3) Delegate particular content sections to relevant individuals with a due date

There will indefinitely be individuals who are well placed to complete various sections i.e. about different ministries, different services. You may wish to delegate this content to others however, make sure you give a due date (well in advance of your go live date) so that you can collate good content in time.

It could also be with having your key individual rewrite/stylise all the content into a similar 'tone of voice' across the whole website as this will help build trust and consistency.

The same is true for your website photography. When done well, all photos have a similar look/feel although displaying different content. For more advice on church website photography - take a read of these recent blogs:

- How to take photographs sensitively in Church

- How to choose your website images  

4) Decide when you'll agree by (and stick to it!) 

This is harder than it sounds and may mean being conservative in your initial due date. If you have a committee structure (like the PCC) that meets each quarter, maybe aim for 2 quarters (6 months time). We advise that it takes between 6-8 weeks to build a church website, given all the content. However, we often find that content is hard to collate and the approval following this is lengthly. 

5) Give information well in advance if the design needs to be approved by a committee, meeting or other leaders 

It's worth adding that if your website design needs to be approved, make sure you give decision makers the relevant information well in advance. At Church Pages we shall give you a temporary domain with your new site on, and you could therefore demo the site, if you wish. 

6) Understand it's not final

The brilliant thing about building a website on a content management system is that you can change the content at a later date. Your content needs to be accurate however, less is more if you are struggling to complete the site. It's far more important to have a secure (HTTPS), mobile-friendly presence online now than to have a highly polished, accurate website in a years time.   

Can we help?

If there is anyway we can help you with your church website design, do not hesitate to get in touch with our team.