CHURCH WEBSITE DESIGN RESOURCES

You know, it’s a funny thing, over time one develops skills and informed intuitions from engaging in one endeavor- over and over again. In other words, one gets very good at something from working at it over an extended period of time. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, God made us to be creatures with an incredible potential to learn. You could say that He designed each of us to be specialists- in one form or another. And this trend in human design and potential is evident in our particular specialty here at New Leaf: Christian website and specifically, church website design.

That’s right, church website design is the thing that we’ve been working at- for years now. And along the way we’ve learned quite a few things. And that learned understanding, paired with (hopefully!) some God-given design skills, have helped us to become real specialists in the field not just of website design- but specifically church website design and Christian web design. Because we’ve worked on so many church website projects, we’ve learned over time what can make or break a Christian church website. Curious as to what some of our revelations are? Well, read on! This is our first of a series of articles touching on some major dos and don’ts of church website design. Let’s begin this series with the following point:

1.) Church websites should be designed for cross-user and cross-browser compatibility.
Did you just read that heading and scratch your head in perplexed frustration? Well, fear not. I’m about to unpack it in plain English. The thing is, sometimes a rookie designer, working on a computer at home can get a website design to look pretty cool. Sometimes churches will even hire such people to put together their church website. This might not be the wisest decision however.

The thing is, when you’re designing a church website you have to design within parameters that will work for the majority of people who might make use of said church website. And the thing is, not everyone’s going to be using the same screen size, computer hard-drive, web browser, etc. And that’s where church website design can get tricky. One has to design in such a way as to make a church website render (read: display) well for as many of these people as possible. Now, if someone’s using a Commodore 64 then there’s not much you can do for them! They need to get with the right century! But seriously, even for those people with computers and software purchased in the last five years, vast differences still exist.

Let’s take the screen size issue as an example. Now how do you design a church website so that as many people as possible can see it, interact with it, without a quarter of the website drifting off to oblivion at the side of the page? Well, you center your church website template with a consistent width, with tastefully designed borders on either side. These borders are designed to stretch and skew to fit a particular user’s screen size. But the main church website template itself will remain consistent, regardless of what screen size of resolution is being used.

Now, on to our second point in this heading section: church website design should allow for cross-browser compatibility. Now what exactly does that mean? Well, perhaps you’re reading this page in the Internet Explorer browser. The thing is, the next person that comes along might very well read the same page using the Firefox browser. Now the key, from a website design point of view, is to design this webpage is such a way that it renders well (and consistently) for both users.

Now, you’d think there wouldn’t be much to this, right? Well, think again. For some strange reason there is still not all that much consistency between browsers. So it takes a website design specialist to be able to make a website look and interact the same way in multiple browsers. Back in the day the two dominant browsers were Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator.

Today IE is still around but Navigator is only a remnant of our imaginations. The new kid on the virtual block is Mozilla’s Firefox browser. And, word to the wise, this is probably the superior browser. It’s actually forced IE to update some of its outdated conventions. But I digress… The point is that both of these browsers are used an awful lot. That includes usage by visitors and church members visiting and using your church website. So a good and savvy designer is going to make sure that the church website design he or she is working on for you is going to work equally well in these two giants of the virtual stage.

Now, you might think this is a minor point. After all, what’s the big deal if only slight differences in rendering exist between Internet Explorer and Firefox? Well, maybe not too much- although perfectionists like us would tell you otherwise! But, in reality, these rendering inequalities are sometimes catastrophic in scale. Seriously, I’m not exaggerating here. You see browsers do not apply moderation. How could they? They’re just computer programs! And what that means is that sometimes one particular piece of code that might perfectly well in one browser will prove disastrous in another. Images and whole blocks of content can disappear, pages can skew into obscurity, and sometimes a website visitor will see nothing but a blank page. Now how useful is that?

Believe me, it can and does get ugly. There are church websites populating the World Wide Web right now that render like virtual accidents in certain browsers. And there are more of these out there than you probably care to know about! Now, obviously this doesn’t bode well for churches that are attempting to be as available as possible for people interested in Jesus and in connecting with a church community.

This is exactly why the skills and experience of church website design specialist are so essential. And may be humbly suggest, we are the experts you’re looking for. Church website design is what we do- day in and day out. We think about design appeal, layout, usability, and flexibility each and every time we embark on a new church website design project. And by hiring us to design your next church website you can take benefit from that wealth of experience. If you have questions about church website design, or you’re ready to get started on your next project, whether it is a first-time church website for a new church plant, or a church website re-design, we’d ready to work with you to make your virtual vision an impacting virtual reality. And by choosing from one of our very economically priced church website design packages you're guaranteed a top-notch virtual product for a price well within your church website budget.