What Makes a Good Church Website Design?
by Rhonda Abbott Blevins, Pinnacle Web Design Coordinator
I paid my way through seminary as a graphic artist. Back then I had no idea how to build a website. Years later my own church hired a web designer, and I watched the whole process from the sidelines. Somewhere along the way I thought, I could do that.
So I did. I started building sites for friends, then built a new site for Pinnacle Leadership Associates, and eventually realized I had something to offer. There are plenty of web designers out there. There aren’t many who have spent thirty years in vocational ministry and also love fonts, color palettes and navigation menus. I’ve now built dozens of websites, many of them for churches, and here’s what I’ve learned about what makes one good.
Your website is the front door of your church.
This is the most important thing I can tell you. Most first-time guests will visit your website before they ever walk into your sanctuary. For many people, your website is their first visit.
That means the site isn’t mainly for your members. I know that may be hard to hear, because members are the ones who notice when the potluck isn’t on the calendar. But your regulars already know when worship starts and where to park. The person who needs your website most is the one sitting at her kitchen table on a Saturday night, wondering if she’s brave enough to try church again.
So write for her. Cut the jargon, because she doesn’t know what “the Narthex” or “WMU” means. Answer the questions she’s actually asking:
What time is worship?
Where’s the livestream link?
Where do I park?
What should I wear?
Do you have childcare?
What denomination are you, and what do you believe?
The first two are what most people want in the first few seconds. If a visitor has to hunt for your worship time, you’ve set the wrong tone from the beginning.
Most church websites have the same problem.
When a church calls me, the story is often the same. Their current site was built years ago by someone in the congregation who meant well and gave generously of their time, but didn’t have an eye for design. The site is hard to look at and hard to navigate, and half the content is out of date.
I don’t say that to criticize anyone. That volunteer probably saved the church a lot of money. But websites age faster than we’d like. As a rule of thumb, a church site needs to be redeveloped about every five years or it starts to look dated, and a dated website quietly suggests a dated church, even if yours is anything but.
Design from who you are, not from a template.
A good church website should feel like your church and nobody else’s. Here are three examples from my own work.
First Baptist Church, Greenwood, South Carolina. Their old site was hard to navigate and not much to look at. But they already had a sharp, colorful logo, so I pulled those colors through the whole site. They also have stunning stained-glass windows, so I took the shape of those windows and made custom graphics for each of their ministries. The site now looks like it belongs to that building and that congregation.
Lewis Memorial United Methodist Church, Evans, Georgia. Their tagline is “We are better together.” Rather than open with the usual photo of the church building or people in the pews, I used a video of silhouettes of people of all ages walking hand in hand. The graphics throughout the site have a scrapbook look, because that’s what a church family is: a collection of stories and snapshots that belong together.
Bethel Church, Columbia, Missouri. Bethel is a small church that wanted a quality online presence. We started by working out their “superpower,” which I’ll say more about below. Their community meals rose to the top, so we made sure those were front and center on the homepage. And like Greenwood, they have a distinctive stained-glass window, so its shape became the frame for the site’s original graphics.
Ask your church: “What’s your superpower?”
This is my favorite part of the whole process. I sit down with a small team of leaders and ask one question: What is your church’s superpower? What’s your best gift to the world?
I love watching people light up when they answer. Something shifts in the room. Leaders who’ve spent the last hour talking about budgets and parking lots suddenly start telling stories.
Their answers shape the homepage. I usually highlight three or four ministries. For Bethel, that was worship, community meals, their book club and their ministry to local college students. Those four things are Bethel, and now a visitor can see that at a glance.
My unpopular opinion: keep your homepage static.
A lot of designers will tell you your homepage should constantly change, with rotating sliders, fresh announcements and the latest news. I disagree, at least for most churches.
Here’s why. Once I finish a site, I typically hand it over to a church administrator, and the average church administrator is already doing about twelve jobs. They aren’t a graphic designer, and they shouldn’t have to be. A homepage that needs constant updates will, sooner or later, look cluttered and neglected.
So I design homepages to be evergreen. They look good in January and still look good in August, whether anyone touched them or not.
That doesn’t mean the site stands still. The changing content just lives in places built to handle it:
An events page that automatically removes events once they’ve passed, so nobody finds last spring’s picnic in October.
A blog page for sermon manuscripts.
Seasonal cover pages for Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter.
Pop-ups to highlight a special event or a new sermon series. I teach the webmaster how to use these.
An announcement bar for weather closures and other urgent news.
The administrator gets simple tools, and the homepage stays sharp.
Photos matter more than you think.
I’ll be blunt about this one. I strongly encourage every church to hire a professional photographer to take photographs of church buildings and grounds as well as candid shots of the congregation worshiping, serving, eating together, learning and laughing. Real photos of your real people are worth the money.
If that’s not in the budget, I’ll work with the photos a church provides, as long as they’re high quality, or I’ll use quality stock images. What I won’t do is use low-quality photos. A blurry, poorly lit picture undermines everything else on the page. Honestly, I’d rather use a good stock image than a bad photo of your fellowship hall.
Small budget? Start here.
Not every church can afford a full redesign right now, and that’s okay. If you can only fix a few things, fix these:
Fix your homepage first. Remove dated or blurry photos, simplify your navigation bar, and write for the first-time guest, not your regulars.
Put your livestream link near the top. Don’t make people dig for it.
Get a high-quality logo. It sets the tone for everything else.
Post worship times. Put this information in the footer so that it will show up on every page.
What success looks like.
After First Baptist Greenwood launched their new site, word came back from the congregation: “We can find things now!”
I love that comment because it’s so ordinary. Nobody said “stunning” or “innovative.” They said they could find things, and that’s the point. Good design mostly gets out of the way.
Other feedback has followed the same pattern. People appreciate how easy online giving has become. They like filling out a form on the website instead of downloading a PDF, printing it, and dropping it off at the church office. And yes, they notice when the site looks better. People can tell when a church cared enough to get it right.
Let’s build your front door together.
There are lots of options for web design. There aren’t many options for a designer who knows church from the inside, who has sat through the committee meetings, preached the sermons and understands why the guest parking question matters.
If your church’s website is ready for a fresh start, I’d love to talk. I’m Rhonda Blevins, web design coordinator at Pinnacle Leadership Associates, and you can reach me at rabbottblevins@gmail.com. Let’s find your superpower and show the world.