Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 In today's episode, we discuss how your church can build better church website, navigation, menus. Now that might not seem like something. That's all that interesting, but I'll tell you this. If you don't get your church website navigation, right? Your website is dead in the water. We hope this conversation helps your church reach more people and grow. This is the reach right podcast.
Speaker 1 00:00:30 You're listening to the <inaudible> podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 0 00:00:57 Hey guys, welcome to the room. <inaudible> podcast, episode number 54. I am your host Thomas Costello. And with me as always is my cohost
Speaker 2 00:01:06 Ian Hyatt. What's up Thomas. Hey, not
Speaker 0 00:01:08 Much and excited to chat today about our conversation. It's how to build better church website, navigation, menus, exciting, exciting topic, very riveting stuff. I know, but it's something that I think is so important. We eat, breathe and sleep this year at reach, right? Because one of our main services we do as a business is we help churches get websites done. Right. Uh, and this is probably I'd say the hardest part of any website project for a church, uh, has building and thinking through. And, uh, flowcharting out the website navigation, uh, so something that's so important to do. Am I right?
Speaker 2 00:01:49 Very right. And this is something that's still really overlooked out there. And I see so many church websites with busy navigation menus and drop-downs and all sorts of stuff, and the terms are messed up and, you know, case in point we just wrapped up a project or getting a project into design. We spent
Speaker 0 00:02:12 Three hours, three
Speaker 2 00:02:14 Hours just talking about navigation.
Speaker 0 00:02:18 I think time that was the talking time of five people, five people talking for three hours. And then there was all the prep time and all that stuff that happened outside of there and looking through stuff and thinking through it. So, I mean, that's a, it's probably a total of 20 hours, I guess, of everybody's time trying to figure this thing out here. So, yeah. And,
Speaker 2 00:02:37 And the funny thing is, is that that amount of time we spent really determined the whole direction of the project. So this is more important than a lot of people really know. And so it did at first glance, you're like, oh wait, wait, I just need an about page. I need this or whatever. So it goes deeper than that.
Speaker 0 00:02:53 So, yeah. Yeah. I think the old way of doing it is, um, you would just all the things you normally have, you've seen on other websites. So it's the about, and the ministries and, uh, the, uh, events and giving and sermons and that kind of stuff. And you put it out there under each one of them. You're going to have a long drop down with all the different content that's on there, one for every page. And I think if we actually get a little bit more strategic with these things, there is a huge opportunity to engage with more people, have people spend longer on your site, have them find the content that they're looking for because there is nothing more frustrating than fraud than bad navigation, right? How often do we take on a new project and we're looking at their navigation and it's impossible to find the stuff that we're looking for.
Speaker 0 00:03:43 So things are buried under lots of tiers of navigation, and it's just impossible to find what we want to find there. Uh, and that just really makes for a bad user experience. And I think one of the things that our goal needs to be as when we talk about website navigation menus, first of all, we need to remember who we're building the site for. Right? So this isn't one of the points just yet. But I think when we talk about this today, we're talking about building a website navigation menu that is first and foremost for visitors, right? So it's people that have not yet been, or have maybe been once or twice to your church, the new and don't know about things because here's the reality is your members don't get onto your about page every single week. Oh man, I just tried
Speaker 2 00:04:27 To just really love our beliefs. I want to read over them over and over again.
Speaker 0 00:04:31 I want to meditate on our beliefs and look up all the scripture references. And we all love that guy. We would love that person, uh, who to be a part of our church, someone that wants to pour over everything we write there, but they are like one out of a thousand. Like those people don't exist very often. So you need to think about who is using this. Uh, and that should be the lens that we look through building our church website navigation menus when we do that. So yeah, so we have five, uh, I guess, ideas on how people can do a better job with this. Um, I think each one is really equally important. Uh, but I'll go ahead and kick us off with the first one is, uh, when you're building a website navigation menu less is more, having less content is more, uh, and there's a few ways that we, we think you should be doing this, but I really think the job, the challenge for us is not trying to find enough to say, it's trying to find how we can reduce what we're already saying down to the most concise package and the concise number of links that we possibly can.
Speaker 0 00:05:37 Um, uh, honestly I'm seeing this trend gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Uh, and I think if I could get a church website down to like three links in a button that would be an enormous win, like trying to talk people that, that project we just did, it was basically four links and a button. So it was, it was really trying to hone that in. And the customer was very excited about that the church and the pastor was there and they were on board with us here, but that's not for the faint of heart trying to get all of your content into four primary pages and really guiding that conversation. That way. It isn't an easy thing to do, but I will say that the fewer that we can offer, the less we can have on there, it really helps to hone that decision-making process.
Speaker 0 00:06:24 Because what we find with a lot of people is they get what's called analysis paralysis. They're stuck analyzing, Hey, where do I click? What do I want to do? I want to know more about connecting or serving, or should I click on I'm new? Or should I click on what's new for my kids? Or should I click on? And so if we can reduce those number of choices to just giving them a very clear primary choice or a few choices, there's, there's a lot of evidence out there that shows you'll get more results and more people clicking on content that way. So any place we can reduce, the number of links and the content on there, it really goes a long way to make, to get us better results on the site. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:07:06 I remember years ago, and I don't know, this might still be the rule, but I think that we're trending away from this rule that you were supposed to have no more than you should have between five and nine links in the main navigation. And no more than nine, I would say nine is
Speaker 0 00:07:25 A lot these days, way too much.
Speaker 2 00:07:27 And like you said, we're seeing a trend we're seeing more churches already having, before we even recommend simplifying like this, they already have it in mind that they would like to do that. So, you know, churches are wising up to that and making it a lot more simple, but it it's, it's not, it's not a simple task to make it more simple. So like you said, it's, it takes a lot of thought and, and organizing and thinking through that, but it's, it's worthwhile.
Speaker 0 00:07:55 Yeah. I think that if it were, um, if it, if it was my church, uh, and you know, there's not an exact right way to do this. So I hesitate to even share kind of like what I would recommend because, you know, w we didn't spend 20 hours on this last project for nothing. Cause we, you know, it's something that really takes some work from church to church, but generally speaking, you probably need a link for people that are new, but that's probably the chief link you want to make sure there's a big, clear probably button. We'll talk more about that later, but, uh, probably a really clear link for people that are new. You probably want a clear one for how someone gets connected. You know, basically it's housing, a lot of your ministry opportunities and those kinds of things there. And then you want something for resources at your church, which would be things like, uh, events and sermons and those, and so if you could get it down to those three, uh, those are probably the chief ones.
Speaker 0 00:08:49 Now there's some situations where we think having a serving a navigation would be good if we could find different for that, uh, kind of an assimilation one, or take a next step. Sometimes those are good. There's lots of different ways to do this, but if I was going to whittle it down to three and you, that you needed to have and be something like the I'm new slash about the connect slash ministries and then a resources kind of an area, which would include ways that members and people get connected to the church there. So, you know, again, w this is something that you need to spend the time on. That's not for every church, but that's kind of an idea of how simple we're talking about.
Speaker 2 00:09:24 That's good. Well, I'll tackle the next one here, which is to ditch the dropdown menus. I am so surprised how many church websites I see with still just busy dropdown menus. And this is where you hover your mouse over, or your finger. If you're on a phone over an about page, and a big drop down menu comes up for a page to click on the mission and vision statement, a page to click on the beliefs, a page to click on the staff, a page to pick, you know, click on whatever you don't need that anymore. And we can thank how much mobile browsing takes place for this reason. So, and this has been for several, for over five years, we've we have really tried to encourage churches to not have any dropdown menus on their website. So it was a task for us to eliminate those from our company website to really try to do that. Yeah. And, and, but it makes good sense. And because people are coming by way of phones, most of the time, now, when they're coming to your website, the more work they have to do and click through and, you know, to get to things, the more impatient they get, and the more likely they are to leave your website. So that's one, one particular reason, or a couple of reasons, but you have some other reasons I'm sure as to why this is a good thing to ditch as well. The dropdown menu.
Speaker 0 00:10:48 Yeah. I think that it, it adds, it goes against number one, which is less, is more. So I think when you have a dropdown, it's just a way to kind of cheat and get lots of, lots of content on to things. So I've seen that where people are really proud, we're going to get down to three links at the top, but every link is going to have 14 sub links and then another tier under each one of those. So you can find everything on the site. That's really, it's, it's, it's fighting the same battle, basically. So it's really thinking through this, you said it again, mobile browsing, we prefer to not use dropdowns or, uh, multiple tiers is what it turns into. So on a mobile device, what a dropdown becomes, usually if it's done, right, at least is it's a hamburger menu. And then a link that you click on.
Speaker 0 00:11:32 So you'd click on about, and then it would pop out another menu that says, uh, you know, it'll be vision and mission, and then you'll go to mission. And so will be this like four clicks to get to the content you want to go to. That's not how people want to browse. They want to browse on mobile devices and longer format pages. And they can scroll through the content of the way that people use Twitter or Instagram. They're used to scrolling. It's not clicking on every single person to read their post for the day. You don't click on them. You actually, it shows up in your feed that way. So some fresh numbers. I was just looking at some of our analytics today, as of this, over the last 30 days here at ReadWrite, 73% of our content was on a mobile device. That's how it was served up.
Speaker 0 00:12:17 So it's just about three quarters of it is coming on a mobile device right now. I think for churches, that'll be probably even higher because we have a product that people like to look at on a computer because they want to look at, you know, it's a web product. So people are kind of used to looking at things that way and getting into the details of it. But in this particular case, I think for churches, you might have even higher numbers. So thinking about a mobile experience is of the utmost importance. You really have to do that. So, uh, yeah, that drop-downs are a big no-no for us. Um, we've done it maybe a handful of times in the past, in the past few years, uh, we've done it a handful because, uh, usually because of someone insisting, but the, the one time I remember is that we had a, uh, website for a church that had 15 campuses and there was just no, no good way for us to deliver 15 campuses, uh, content. And we did have ways to deliver it in, in the, in the content, but we really felt like it was probably an okay approach to have a dropdown where the one-time they click on choose your campus. And then they choose the campus that they want to go to in their community there. But really it is something to be avoided if at all.
Speaker 2 00:13:30 Yeah, absolutely. And we've also found one more little thing I'll add is most of the time when a church has all these dropdown menus, if someone were to click on one of these, when they scroll down and they click on, let's just say it's mission and vision statement. Usually that's not, there's not even enough information that would warrant there being another page within that dropdown. And again, if we're talking simple, we can get stuff on a more longer, more well-designed page. So we've been finding that too.
Speaker 0 00:13:59 Yeah. I think if your mission statement needs an entire page of your website, you need to rewrite your mission statement and probably simplify that a little bit so that it doesn't take an entire page and it takes more like two lines of texts. So, yeah, that's the point there? So, all right. Number three, we've mentioned this briefly use a button, use a button in your navigation. Uh, this is one of those really, uh, proven, uh, we have metrics to back it up and we've seen this work, uh, usually on menus. You'll see, uh, you know, just, uh, the, the text. So you'll have the, about the, uh, the connect area, the events and sermons and those kinds of things, and a lot of churches miss this opportunity, but businesses usually get it. So if you get onto just about any business that sells a product, they're going to have a up now a, uh, uh, by now, something like that in the very top right corner, our eyes are used to going there or some kind of an action item to take a step.
Speaker 0 00:15:01 So that's kind of a, a trained response is that people will put their primary call to action right there in the top right corner. So for us, we want to introduce our two primary services at retry. We have our Google grant management and our web development projects. We have two buttons on the very top right there that we really want to make sure good people's eyes go to those, having those right there. That's where that will go. So for churches, this button should almost certainly be, I knew it should be that button there for a visitor to know exactly where to go in the top, right. It's going to be a big contrast in color. So if you can use bright green, then use bright green. If your elevation church you're using bright orange, whatever it would be, you use that bright color right there on the top, right of your navigation. It probably is coming off on the wrong side, on, on the camera here. Cause we reverse everything, but this is my right hand. You'll have to understand that. But, uh, so top right is where that goes. A big call to action button. It makes a lot of sense for, uh, uh, for a navigation on a church website to plan
Speaker 2 00:16:04 Your visit. You know, I've even seen it sometimes be the give button, but I'm not sure that's usually the practice that that church has, but those are some other ones that we've seen some.
Speaker 0 00:16:14 Yep, yep, absolutely. Yeah, it can be, um, I wouldn't do give, I think plan your visit is same as I'm new. I think kind of as the same, the same, it's something that is going to specifically appeal to visitors that are getting on there for the first time. So having that really brightened front and center also, we recommend it it's sometimes feels like overkill to people, but it should be on the top. Right. And then it should also be dead center under your subject line or wherever you put that, but in the middle of kind of like think of it as a triangle. Right. So, and I might have to flip things around here for camera's sake. So bear with me, but on the top left, you're going to have your logo, uh, your name of your church on the top, right? You're going to have your big call to action button, and then you're going to repeat that same call to action right below your, your kind of heading or your motto or your tagline there. So that there's no way that someone's going to miss that really big chief important call to action. We have forum, but thinking through that button, it really does a lot to, to affect the results of how you do with your navigation. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:17:18 Good stuff. I'll bring us to the next one here, which is use clear links. You would think this is a no brainer, but the titles to the links in your navigation, very important. I can't tell you how many ones we've seen out there and we get it. The temptation within church life and ministry is to, to, to have some deep theological stuff. Or we've also seen over the years, Christian Christianese so internal language that if you're a pastor or a follower of Jesus already, that makes sense to you. But it does not make sense to someone who is not quite in the faith yet, or a part of your church yet. I've seen some weird ones in navigations, like, you know, engage 4 0 1 or, you know, or just what is fireproof, you know, low down or I don't know. So, and so that may mean something to all of your members, but it means nothing to someone who's Aveda. And we said, again, the number one thing is to focus on the, I like to say the potential visitor. I like to not even think of the visitor first, but the potential, the person who's not yet made up their mind to come check out your church. That is who you really want to put first. And they're not going to, you don't want to make it complex for them. You just want very simple universal terms within the navigation.
Speaker 0 00:18:42 Yep. That's right. Uh, I see a few, a few ways that churches fall into this pitfall most often. So I'll kind of share some of those. So one of the mistakes I see is using, uh, using acronyms or using just the abbreviations for things. So if you have an early childhood development center, uh, you might generally around your church, call it your E C D C and the abbreviation there for that. And if you just put ECDC on your, on your church website and just says that, uh, then no one who is outside of your church, it hasn't been there for a year, is going to know what you're even talking about that. So the odds of them clicking on it and getting more information are slim to none. So that's something that I see pretty often. A lot of times I see churches try to mix it in with kind of their, um, their core values.
Speaker 0 00:19:38 So if their core values are, uh, a church, I used to be a part of, uh, and was a pastor at, we had one where love men train and send, right? So that was our, I love those core values. They're dear to my heart. I think they're really, uh, I think that was really going in the right direction. They're just not good website headings on your navigation there. So I get it. But you know, people say, well, love, that's what we're going to put our visitors stuff because we want to love our visitors. And then man, that's where we're going to put like our counseling services and then train that's where we, our discipleship classes go and then send that's our missions. But the thing is, someone gets on there. They're not going to know, oh, I'm going to click on the men button because that's where I'm going to find the content.
Speaker 0 00:20:21 I don't, they don't come in with this idea that I'm looking for mending services that they're going to think that you're like a tailor or something like that. If you do that, and that's not what we're here to do. So that's another one that I see pretty often. Uh, and then the other one you were kind of getting into a little bit, it's using, um, like trying to be clever with your language on there. Uh, so that it feels like you're a unique, but really what you're only doing is adding confusion. So if you, uh, next steps actually like you have like your, your heading should say something like take a step, right? That's clear, how do I take a step? Um, if you say something that's like, uh, you know, jump in the river because the name of your church is the river or something like that.
Speaker 0 00:21:04 It just people aren't looking to click on links that say jump in the river. Cause they're not looking to do that. They don't want to go jump in a river that they're very literal with these things. So as boring as it seems, it's not wrong to say about or connect or ministries or like, and this sounds weird to say, but use generic terms. Would we use generic terms? People will know what they're going to get behind that door. They're more likely to do it. They're more likely to find the content that they want. They're going to stay on that content longer. And algorithms will start to find it more useful and show your site to more people. So it's just something that will build on itself. So those are a few of the things that I see most often, but clear links. Yeah. It really is something that is important. That's
Speaker 2 00:21:48 Good, good stuff. Well, last but not least.
Speaker 0 00:21:51 Yeah. It it's create a mobile version. Um, this is a big mistake and this is something that most websites now will do automatically in a way. Right? So it'll take your navigation. That's laid out horizontally and turned it into a hamburger navigation. That's those three buttons. So bread meat bread, and you can click on them and it'll bring up all the different options there. But I'm talking about something a little bit more than that. I think that you need to understand that when someone's on a mobile device, they probably have, they're probably a little bit different from someone who's learning about your church on a computer. So for instance, I think someone that's on the mobile device, they're probably more likely to be looking for directions or service times that someone that's on a computer, because you usually look at directions when you're on you're in your car there.
Speaker 0 00:22:41 So it might make sense in some cases to build a totally unique menu that is different. Like if I'm on a mobile device, I think that I probably want to focus on really just the hard hitting things. And the other thing too, is that you have much less screen real estate to work with. So if you have a six or seven link navigation section, well, it's harder to get that all into one screen on a mobile device, especially if you want to add a button. So if I was doing a navigation on a mobile device, so even for our reach right website, we don't have the same buttons on our mobile site as we do on our desktop site. So the big buttons of websites and a grant management for churches, like there's long buttons with lots of words in them that we can't really fit on the limited re real estate of a, uh, just a mobile device there.
Speaker 0 00:23:30 So we limit it to just a few different things. Uh, and they're just plain text links and it's just a better experience. So what I would recommend for every church is get on to your website and actually get on it on a mobile device. Like this is one of the, they make all we make all the time is that we design websites on computers. You need to design it and look at your mobile device first, because like I said, 75% of our traffic is coming on a mobile device. Right. So that's, that's where it is nowadays. So it's something that you need to be thinking about. So get on there, look at how it looks and really ask yourself, ask other people too, how has this experience, I've never been to this church before? What is my experience like do some of the buttons run off of the site on the mobile version is, is what I want to get to really right there within one screen. So asking some of those kinds of questions are really important. Yeah,
Speaker 2 00:24:24 That's good. I think it's, it's kind of assumed these days. If you get a new website that it's just going to look good on a phone or function. Well, just because I think for years now, if you just go get any sort of theme or template out there it's automatically mobile responsive is the term. That means it it'll respond your website or respond well on a mobile device. Um, but this is an extra step to take, uh, to kind of have more of this mobile version. And so it's, it's, it's definitely worth it based on the statistics alone.
Speaker 0 00:24:54 Uh, so yeah, it it's, it's a, uh, I'm not gonna sugar coat. It it's hard. Like, so this is something that's one of our bigger challenges for our designers is that it's not just desktop version and mobile version, right? In our setup, we actually have five different break points. So we have desktop, we have older or like Chrome book, size screens. Then we have tablets. Then we have nice phones and we have older phones. Like there's five different things that we have to look at and we have, but we call them as a break points where it's different resolutions and different orientations. And so it's a matter of looking at what your navigation looks like to try this out. If you're even listening to this podcast, you know, get onto your church website, look at it on your phone, then flip your phone sideways and see what it does and look at how your navigation looks then, and then pull it out on a tablet and see how it looks when you do that. And there's all kinds of different variations of this. So all that to say, it can be really hard, we get it, but it is worth the effort to make sure your website and specifically your navigation on your website works properly. Because if the navigation doesn't work, your website is basically dead in the water. It's not going to get any results if you can't get anywhere. Except when we read the homepage headline people, aren't going to be engaging with your church that way. So yeah, really something important to do.
Speaker 2 00:26:15 Absolutely good closing remark on that. You're dead in the water without a good navigation. So
Speaker 0 00:26:21 Let's water that's right. So don't die in the water, do it right. And, uh, if he needs some help, obviously that's something that we do. Uh, we do this podcast not to, uh, just to be a help to you guys, but this is something that we really do have a lot of expertise in. If you do need some help, feel free to get ahold of our team here. They'd be happy to at least point you in the right direction. Even if we don't work with you directly on that, give you some personal advice on some of those kinds of things. So we'll leave it at that for today. Thank you guys so much for being a part of our reach, right family, uh, for listening to this or watching this podcast weekend and week out, it does mean so much to us. We really love that. We get to go into your, uh, whether it's homes or your phone or your car, wherever you're consuming this content. It means a lot that we get to do that each and every week for you. So we hope it is helpful if it is helpful rate review, subscribe, uh, that just helps us get the word out there to more and more people. Thank you so much for being part of our retreat family. And we'll see you guys next week.
Speaker 1 00:27:21 Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out online at reach, right studios.com. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week.
