Ministry Marketing CoachMinistry Branding and Marketing that Works

Your Mama loves you and she wants the best for you, but even she doesn’t read every page on your website. So sorry to break the news to you! The fact is you may be the only person who has read every page on your website! Typically people only look at 3-4 pages of your site on a visit. And they are not very likely to spend much time on each page either—averaging a few seconds up to 2-4 minutes.

That’s why it is important for you to make the content on every page count. It’s also an argument for you to spend more time thinking about the navigation on your site, so people who visit your site will be more likely to make the pages that are most important to your mission one of the 3-4 pages they visit.

Break out of thinking people are reading every word on your website and start thinking about what people really do when they visit your website. Create profiles of the people in your mind and imagine what they are looking for when they come to your site. These “personas” can become tools that help you in design, in thinking about what to write, in making the navigation of your website logical to their needs.

One site visitor writes about a missionary website that understood her needs when visiting the site:

This site …does an incredible job of explaining cultural barriers to evangelism as well as the religion and history of each people group. The specific suggestions on how we can best pray for missionaries and missions work is great – but I especially like the suggestions on how to most effectively pray for the people.

Here are some mistakes to avoid when developing your website

• Don’t make navigation that takes time to figure out! Cute names and “mystery navigation” (that is navigation that is not intuitive) may be fun to develop, but it is a burden to try to understand. You may be thinking you are being “artsy” but in reality, you are just plain confusing!
• Make it easy to get back to the home page! Often your design software makes it easy to do this. But when you use a third party provider for blogs, images, email list servers, make sure you build in navigation that helps surfers get back to your main page.
• Put a little more into design! (Translation, fork over a little cash for a good design!) A designer can make your site look more up-to-date and will harmonize the colors on your site for easy reading (some sites have links and text that are hard to view on top of darker background colors.)
• Keep your site’s content fresh! Many sites have content that has been the same for months. If you use blogging software like WordPress to manage your site, you can log in and create updates without needing a webmaster. If you can operate Microsoft Word, you already have all the skills you need to use WordPress.
• Eliminate under construction pages! Pages “under construction” really say to web surfer’s, “we stopped working on this website”. If you have a page that is truly under construction, then do not post it to your website until it is ready to be seen. You are always busy in missions work, it’s easy to forget that you have unfinished pages on your site. It’s best to schedule time into your work days and get the site finished, than to leave in “under construction” out on the worldwide web.