What are some ways to enhance your ministry website for a better user experience and ministry involvement?

So often, in ministry we have so many things to care about that our ministry website is put on the back burner.

Maybe you put it up, threw the info it needs on there, and left it alone for months, not realizing so many people tried to come to your website, didn't know how to navigate it, and never reached out to your organization!

Your ministry website is how you represent your ministry to the world.

So what are some ways to enhance it so more people come to your website and immediately want to get involved with your ministry?

Table of Contents

1. Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness
2. Keep Call To Actions Simple
3. Branding
4. Keep Content Up to Date
5. Use SEO Best Practices

1. Prioritize Mobile Responsiveness

Nowadays, most people will go to a website via their phone. Sometimes through scanning a QR code, sometimes through a google search, and sometimes directly to the URL. This is how most people will end up trying to visit your ministry website, yet I see so many ministries forget to prioritize making their website easily accessible on a mobile device!

You can easily shift and change how your website looks on a phone by using media queries!

Media queries are simple way to change the look and feel of a website based on the viewport size of the device. If you have a web developer on staff or hire an independent web developer like myself, they should know how to use them and easily make your website accessible on all viewports!

2. Keep Call To Actions Simple

Many times, I see ministries throwing all the information about their entire ministry straight on the home page. This can be overwhelming for users and may deter them away from navigating the site for longer than a second.

By adding pages dedicated to different CTAs (Call To Actions), it will help users find what they need more easily.

An example of this could be,

• having your home page be about what your ministry is and how someone can donate
• having an about page to dive into the ministry's mission, vision, and staff
• having a volunteer page where users can learn more about how to volunteer at your ministry
• having a news page to update what your ministry is doing in the world with photos that are viewport responsive

Obviously, this gets more complicated with larger organizations, and you may need multiple pages for different categories. However, keeping each page's CTA count at 1 to 2 per page will help users better know how to navigate your website and find what they need.

3. Branding

As a ministry, you will want to have a set color palette and font families dedicated to your ministry branding. These colors and fonts should be used throughout your site. This makes your ministry more recognizable and creates a seamless and visually appealing experience for users.

You may think picking any random colors and fonts will do ok for your website, but in reality, colors and fonts tell a story to the user that you might not expect. Different colors create different feelings in users and you may not realize you are deterring people away simply based off of your branding!

For example the color red can create the feeling of excitement or anger, whereas blue can create the feeling of trust. Learning the psychology of the color wheel can help you come up with your own unique brand that will create familiarity with users.

Also, don't forget to choose your fonts. Fonts also tell a story and are just as important as your colors. You can learn more about choosing the right font for your ministry at What Font Should I Use? or at The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Fonts.

4. Keep Content Up to Date

Going back to my first point, ministries have so much to care about outside of their website, that dedicating someone to updating their website regularly might seem like a waste of time and money.

However, like I also said, your ministry website is how the world gets to know your ministry. Keeping it up to date will let users know that your ministry is still running and involved in its community.

Updating things like photos, news stories, and ministry events can help create a genuine connection with your users and make them feel more engaged and inspired to be apart of your ministry.

5. Use SEO Best Practices

SEO is the searchability of your website. You can add elements in you HTML file to make your website more searchable such as a title tag and description and keywords meta tags. This will help people to be able to find your website easily when searching for it in google or another search engine.

People may be searching for your ministry name in google and are not able to find your ministry website within the first few results. If people don't know the direct URL path to your website, this can create a barrier to people easily finding your website.

You can also add a sitemap.xml file to your website for searchability features as well. View this article from google on how to improve your websites searchability and use search console.

(Also written here)