Targeting Your Site To Your Specific Audience

Content is the key!

First and foremost, realize that the content or information contained on your site is the core / vital key / main reason for your site. No fancy graphics, animated elements, or cool design features will ever be a worthwhile replacement for that content. I will mention this fact multiple times on this site, because it's really that important!

Aiming at two groups of people

The most successful websites are those designed with their target audience clearly in mind. Your target audience is simply those people who you hope to attract to your site, or who will find your site to be useful and be willing to return. Good church websites are hard to create because they must reach two target audiences, not just one. The key to ensuring that your website works well is to design according to the different needs of these two audiences.

Your first and most important audience is those people who are not yet Christians but who are considering coming to your church (perhaps because they have a friend or neighbour who goes, but they want to find out more). The church website offers them an ideal way to find out about the church and the Christian faith in an anonymous way before taking the plunge and coming along in person.

Your website's second audience is your existing church members. This group is less important than the first, for hopefully obvious reasons. So while a good site will have valuable information for church members, it should never do so at the expense of making the site inaccessible to your main audience of non-churchgoers.

Providing relevant content

The key to good design is to ask yourself what the members of each target audience are looking for when they visit your website. Potential visitors to your church probably want to know:

• Will I find this church weird or stuffy? What kind of people attend this church?
• What do the people in this church believe?
• Where is the church located? How do I contact someone from the church or visit?
• What times are the services? Which service should I go to? Are different services different? If so, how?
• Are there facilities for children? for infants? for teens?

Many church websites do not answer these sort of questions. By contrast, again, a good church website is aimed primarily at those who do not yet come to church.

The sort of information which church members may look for on the website is very different. They are more likely to ask questions like:

• Who is preaching next Sunday? What is the topic?
• When is the next Elders/Leadership/Membership meeting?
• Is the prayer meeting on Tuesday or Wednesday?
• When is the next schedule teen event?

Since the questions which church members are asking is so very different from that asked by other visitors, it is very difficult to write one page which is interesting to both sets of visitors. Either you end up giving church members information they already know, in which case they may not bother to look at the rest of the website, or you confuse potential church visitors with information that means nothing to them.

The solution is to have different pages for different audiences. For example, to tell people about the Sunday services create one page containing the basic information which an enquirer might need to know (e.g. service times), and then provide a link to a second page which contains detailed information for church members (e.g. who is preaching). If this is done throughout the site then you will achieve your aim of providing a website which is welcoming and informative for both your casual visitors and your church members.

An additional audience

There is a third group of people who will visit your site, namely those people who are already Christians but who don't go to your church. Perhaps they go to another local church and came across your website, or perhaps they recently moved into the area and are looking for a church. Whoever they are, there is no need to design your website to reach these people. If you have followed the advice given above, your site will already welcome them and provide all the information they need to know.