{"id":290,"date":"2014-04-12T10:29:54","date_gmt":"2014-04-12T09:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/?p=290"},"modified":"2015-06-11T12:15:08","modified_gmt":"2015-06-11T11:15:08","slug":"why-on-earth-did-you-do-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/why-on-earth-did-you-do-that.html","title":{"rendered":"Why on earth did you do that!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Structure, structure structure.\u00a0 That’s what we’re going to talk about.\u00a0 Although content is great and the core of the website, it’s closely followed by structure.\u00a0 You need to figure out a way to signpost things for your visitors so that they can find what they are looking for.\u00a0 This is structure.<\/p>\n

\"h\"<\/a>When you create a website, or think about redoing the one you have you should think about your visitors.\u00a0 There are broadly two main groups, new visitors and members and you need to have a different structure for each.\u00a0 Think about is, new visitors need the about us menu item and the how to find us item.\u00a0 Returning visitors or members don’t, they’ve already read that stuff so don’t put it up for them again!<\/p>\n

Your site needs a login system and area and a public area and you need to have different things on each. Let’s look first at the public area and then if there’s time we’ll get onto the logged in area.\u00a0 Your church website public area needs to contain a few core areas:\u00a0 contact us, about us and a home page.\u00a0 That’s the minimum.\u00a0 These three pages contain the core of what you do and who you are.\u00a0 Out of the three pages it’s likely that only the home page will change regularly, the others are what I’d call a static page.\u00a0 It stays there and does its job which is to tell new visitors who you are and what you’re about.<\/p>\n

So we have static pages and dynamic pages and there are three of them.\u00a0 Let’s talk about the dynamic page – the home page.\u00a0 This is the page that most people will find on your site and have a look at.\u00a0 There are a ton of things you can think about for this page, eye tracking, page elements, signposting and other stuff good web developers like to talk about.\u00a0 However why not try to keep it simple to start.\u00a0 Think about the message you want to give your visitor and create some images for that.\u00a0 Make the images then link to other pages in the site.<\/p>\n

For example perhaps you have an upcoming youth event.\u00a0 Have a picture on the front page that links to another page giving the details and the booking information.\u00a0 Why a picture?\u00a0 Well most studies show that people engage more with an image than text.\u00a0 So if you put a picture on the screen people are more likely to click on it.\u00a0 In fact if you put a picture of a person then visitors are even more likely to click!<\/p>\n

Currently the trend is to have a big picture at the top of the page and some tiles underneath.\u00a0 This seems to be the most attractive format to visitors and is simple to maintain.\u00a0 So create a page with a big picture at the top and perhaps three or four tiles underneath and fill them with photos.\u00a0 Don’t forget you do need a bit of text to indicate where the click will take the visitor!\u00a0 Often when we set up church websites we make the big picture a slider.\u00a0 That means they can have several images sliding across and several “messages” ready for their visitors.<\/p>\n

With the home page you should aim to update it at least once per week – ideally daily unless you have other dynamic pages on the site.\u00a0 Perhaps one of the most common and useful dynamic areas of the site is a blog.\u00a0 At Websites4Christians we supply WordPress blogs, the most popular of all blogs on the web.\u00a0 A blog give you the opportunity to continuously add new material to the site and importantly you don’t have to fit it in with the rest of the site too much.\u00a0 Each blog post tends to stand alone.<\/p>\n

I’ll write some more on the internal members pages tomorrow.\u00a0 But for now just think about the external pages.\u00a0 Create a few static pages like about and contact.\u00a0 Next create some dynamic pages (once that change regularly).\u00a0 For church websites the most common ones are a home page\/welcome page and a blog.<\/p>\n

Finally as a parting thought I wanted to note\u00a0 that not all website providers will allow you the flexibility to have a full blog system as powerful as WordPress mixed into a more powerful website system.\u00a0 For many of them this is too difficult with their own proprietary systems.\u00a0 That said\u00a0 I’m conscious that a blog can form a really important and powerful platform within a website.\u00a0 So I think you have two options: cope with the vagaries of their system or move provider.\u00a0 Perhaps moving is a bit drastic but definitely worth considering if your going to make a blog an important part of the dynamic pages on the website.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Structure, structure structure.\u00a0 That’s what we’re going to talk about.\u00a0 Although content is great and the core of the website, it’s closely followed by structure.\u00a0 You need to figure out a way to signpost things for your visitors so that they can find what they are looking for.\u00a0 This is structure. When you create a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22,40],"tags":[13,26,14,10,28,11,25,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":292,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290\/revisions\/292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/websites4christians.com\/our-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}