What Visitors Expect from Your Website
In considering how welcoming a parish (or any other) website is, we need to look beyond including the word “Welcome” on the site which as you know, I think is important. We need to offer what visitors can legitimately expect us to provide.
A truly welcoming website has essential fixed content clearly identified, has timely information and links that work. It sounds obvious doesn’t it? But to look at some parish, religious organization and ministry sites, we see that it is not that obvious.
- When someone visits a parish website, they are normally looking for something specific. Often they are there for the same reason other people visit. They want the address with zip code, the phone number with area code, office hours, Mass and Confession hours. They might also want to know how to register or become a Catholic, how to arrange sacraments for themselves or their children, or how to enroll their children in the Catholic School or the Parish School of Religion.
For religious communities, visitors may want to locate a priest, sister or brother that they have lost touch with; they may be looking for historical data about your ministries; or a link to one of your mission activities, or for prayers for a special intention.
When someone visits your site, is the essential information obvious to them?
2. Some people are visiting a website to learn what is happening at your parish or with your religious community today. Will they find that on your website? This could be in the form of features about current activities or members, schedules, bulletins, or newsletters. One parish I visited in July, still featured the Advent letter from the pastor for the previous Advent. Not a good look!
3. Everything cannot go on the Home Page, so naturally there will be links to much of the content a website provides. These links need to work and the content they connect to needs to be up to date. It is very easy to forget about calendars, schedules and other dated content and let them sit on a website past their time. When someone discovers that the website is apparently not being attended to, they might assume that is how a parish or religious community operates in other areas as well and be turned off.
Paying attention to the details on a website can be tedious work, but that attention to detail speaks loudly to those who visit. It says either “we are here to serve you our visitor” or “we’re very busy and we can’t be bothered with your needs.”
Even the most attentive website manager can miss some detail or link that needs to be updated. That is why it is a good idea to review all the pages of a website at least once a year. Take a section at a time until you check them all. You may find only one or two things that need to be updated, but those may be the very things your visitors are seeking. People trust that what they find on a Church or religious website is true and accurate—we don’t want to disappoint them.
How visitor-centered is your website?