What kind of content do churches need for a new website?
Even if you hire someone else to design and build your new church website, the church will still be responsible for creating a certain amount of content for it. There are four types of content I’ll mention to help you prepare.
COPYWRITING
Copywriting refers to the written content for your website. Hopefully your designer will coach you on what kind of copy is effective and what is, well, not so much.
You will need to get ministry descriptions, vision/mission/ values statements, dates/time/locations for certain events and gatherings, and the list goes on. The most important advice I can give you about the copy you create is to keep it brief and keep it focused on your target audience. When you type long and detailed paragraphs, people are unlikely to read it. When you focus your copy entirely on your church’s identity, you could be missing the pressing need of the person who is searching for a church.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Whenever I start a website project with a church I immediately ask if they have any quality photography of the church, ministries, people, etc. If they do not, then I ask if there’s room in the budget to get some.
Quality photography is absolutely essential to creating a great church website. It’s the window you are giving people into your Sunday morning experience. Without it, they are left to guess what the church looks like, feels like, and what to expect.
Also, photography provides the impost important visual experience on the website. If it’s all flashy graphics or long paragraphs of text, it will get boring pretty quickly.
VIDEOGRAPHY
Videography isn’t essential but it is powerful. If you can provide video sermons (more common in the Covid era) testimony video from people in your church, tours of your facility or children’s ministry area, this can really help potential visitors take their first step.
But of course, videography can be expensive and time consuming to create, so you’ll want to budget this and give yourself plenty of time to make it happen.
APPLICATIONS
This final content category is a catch-all for the 3rd party applications you’ll want to link from or integrate into your church website. This is anything from donation embeds, to ChMS connections, to forms & registrations.
While a lot of these things are not necessarily a part of your website, they are important tools you’ll want to build in to make your calls to action are effective.
