Effective Parish Website, Part IV: Homepage Design
The most effective parish website homepage designs address the needs of the intended audiences: visitors, seekers, and members. We recognize that active parishioners are the least likely to visit the parish website, because they get the information they are seeking through Church announcements, fliers, and the parish bulletin. So we place a high priority on content for visitors and seekers.
In the previous post, I discussed what I called “fixed content” which is relevant all the time: Mass and confession schedules, contact information, access to the bulletin, how to become a Catholic, how to join the parish, etc. My recommendation is to build the homepage design giving first place to the fixed content while leaving sufficient flexible space for the seasonal content.
By flexible space, I mean space that can hold a variety of media: images, text, or video and can be expanded to fit the amount of items available. There are times during the year when there is not much seasonal content to post. The website design needs to hold up with less and sometimes no seasonal content.
Here are two parish websites which I manage that demonstrate what I am saying:
- St. John Bosco Parish in Parma Heights, Ohio. We worked with a professional website designer to create this WordPress site and it has held up well for more than 5 years. I update the people photos in the rotating gallery at the top and add relevant news items. The Parish Administrative Assistant enters the calendar information.
- St. Columbkille Parish in Parma, Ohio This website uses the eCatholic Bethany template which I helped the eCatholic team design several years ago. The Parish secretaries enter the calendar information, I post the news items.
With both parishes, some content comes from parish staff and other content comes from the parish bulletins which I read each week. Frequently, I create the images for the news items. Sometimes, I re-write bulletin content to be more helpful to website visitors.
Whether you use a professional designer or a template to create your website is not as important as knowing your audiences and your content priorities before you select either.
If your parish has a website that has a homepage design that meets the needs of your audiences and looks good regardless of how much news you have to report, please share the link in the comments below.
As always, your comments are welcome!