When building your church website, you need to assume that you’ll get some visitors that know nothing about your church. As such, you should always offer links to more information when you’re writing content on your site.
The two biggest examples are your facility and your staff. The site shouldn’t focus on the building – the church is about the people in it, not the building they’re in. However, if you mention “This event will be meeting in our Sanctuary”, the word Sanctuary should be linked to a page with more info about your Sanctuary. We have a section in our “About Us” area that has information about all of our major buildings. Each building is on a separate page so that they can be linked to individually. If you visit our worship information page, you’ll notice all of the links. You simply need to assume that people don’t know what your Sanctuary is like.
The same goes for staff members. When you mention a staff member, make sure you link it to a page with more info – not just a quick “mailto:” link. Again, the person viewing your site might not have any idea who “Bob Smith” is, so giving them an e-mail link is not real helpful. The page they land on doesn’t need to be especially fancy. I typically try to at least include the staff member’s name, position at the church, phone number and e-mail address. In some cases, I’ll add a picture and a short bio. To see an example of this, you can view our Katrina relief info page. Notice “Charlie Marus” linked at the top, or “Susan Folger” linked near the bottom.
In my opinion, you should link everything you can. Every time you mention the words “Sunday School”, link them to a Sunday School page. Few things will frustrate a first-time visitor more than wanting more info about something and not being able to find it. Link, link, link!
