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What Makes a Healthy Online Presence for Churches? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Over a period of six months we monitored the usage of all of iMinistries websites using Google Analytics. Some results were to be expected. Others surprised us. From these statistics we've come to the conclusion that the convergence of technology, social media, and design/UX create a healthy church web presence.

Technology

Definition: The platform your website is built upon, and how you manage website content.

A church should be using some sort of content management system (CMS). Website content includes, pages, blog entries, sermons, news, and events. This technology should be SEO friendly and easy to update.

Why?: People come to your website for content (see the astounding numbers below). It is important to present that content in a way that is easy to find and interesting. A CMS is the best tool for completing those tasks because:

A CMS helps you organize your content.
A CMS lets you concentrate on the content, instead of the back-end technology.
A CMS makes your website findable on search engines.

Social Media

Definition: Outlets used to engage and connect with users and draw traffic to your website.

Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube, and LinkedIn are a few examples. Newcomers are Google+ and Pinterest--both showed good results in the first six months, but not enough to give much thought to them yet. We plan on revisiting this in another six months and are curious to see if that changes.

Why?: Social media hubs like Facebook give you a level of personal interaction that is usually lacking on your main website. Twitter and video sites can also help your content be shared to audiences who wouldn't normally come into contact with you.

Design/UX

Definition: How your website looks and functions.

Is it easy to navigate and find content. Is your website visually appealing? Is it simple? Your website should look professional. This design should be carried over into the social media outlets to create a uniform online presence.

Why?: What good is content if your visitors can't find it? Or if interacting with your website is not a positive experience? Your UX leaves a lasting impression to users, most of the time within seconds of their arrival.

The Infographic

Put all these things together, and you have a healthy web presence. Here is a visual representation of our data:

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3 comments

On 2/21/02012 3:03 PM, D webster said... After reading your post via Linked In I feel like I just read a whole bunch about nothing. I give you thumbs up for finding a unique way to incorporate many top keywords in an article while having it actually readable.
Thanks for letting us know that our ministry website should be built using some sort of content management system (CMS). Maybe you should tell us which one? Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal are a few top CMS platforms which one should we use? Is there an advantage to using one over the other? Is security stronger using one over the other? Custom templates, or customized templates?

You also stated that a CMS is the best tool for completing those tasks because:

     1: A CMS lets you concentrate on the content, instead of the back-end technology. Have you ever seen the back end control panel of a CMS? Drupal for example is a pain to deal with when your configuring modules. Joomla can be hard for people to work with that do not understand the concept or user positions or PHP scripting. I am a professional web developer and I still have to look at the help section of a file from time to time.

    2. A CMS makes your website findable on search engines.
Implementing a CMS can be a boon to SEO efforts, but it can be a disaster because many CMS systems were not designed with search engine marketing in mind. Some specific problems that content generated by this kind of CMS has in being indexed by search engines include:

Dynamic URLs. Search engines are programmed to limit the number of dynamic pages they index, and the primary way they determine pages are dynamic is through page URLs with special characters (%&=). A URL like http://sampleWebsite.com/page.asp?id=123&session=234234wrwresf&param=xsfdsd throws up red flags for search engine spiders. A URL like http://sampleWebsite.com/products.aspx does much better.

Bad meta tags. Meta tags are the HTML code components that search engines use to evaluate what a page is about. Many CMS systems do not allow users to assign unique, relevant TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags to content. These are important tools to help search engines understand your pages.

Keyword poor URLs. Even systems that do not use dynamic URLs often do not let you create URLs that include keywords. Keyword-rich URLs are an important step in optimizing your pages to rank well in search engines.

Search engine unfriendly design.  If a page has the look and feel you want, does the underlying code matter? In a word, yes!  Search engines can't see the page, so all they have to go on is the code. It is possible (and all to common) for designers and CMS systems alike to create pages that are virtually invisible to search engine spiders because of text in images, script-based navigation, overuse of AJAX and a host of other practices. On the other hand, it is possible through practices like semantic markup and CSS based layout and navigation to create pages that search engines can easily crawl and understand.

While CMS can be used and I use them often, the truth is they can be hard to use where as you make them sound like the best, easiest and only way churches should have a website.

On 2/21/02012 4:12 PM, David Pohlmeier said... Thank you for taking the time to post a comment about this infographic. When reading your comment I believe that you may have missed the point of the infographic and the article itself. We aren’t talking about just a CMS. We are talking about the overall web presence that a church has. The convergence of Technology, Social Media and Design are what makes for a healthy online presence. A CMS is the technology that drives the content. By technology/content we are referring to the ability to add news, event, blogs, pages, images, etc. I don’t think that an argument could be made that would make sense for any church to not use a CMS to create the content. Again, if you look at the data we provided, it’s clear that keeping a website up to date and using social media will help increase the traffic to a website dramatically. Admittedly, design is more subjective, but a valid argument can be made that good design goes a long way.

You suggest in your first paragraph that we should tell you which CMS to use. Again, this wasn't the point of the article. While I prefer ours, we understand that it's not always the right solution for every church or ministry. Personally, I have tried all of the ones you mentioned and have tried other companies like ours that provide a custom built Church CMS. Each has it's own advantages. Each individual church or ministry needs to perform their due diligence and decide what’s best for them. Honestly, I don't see any reason why any website (church or non-church) would be built without being on a CMS platform. A static site is not easy for the end user to update. The old model of web development was to have the end user pay the developer to make all the changes. This model isn't used anymore. Most users expect to make changes and don’t want to pay someone to update content on a regular basis. Especially a church that probably has a limited budget and is being charged to be good stewards of the money that has been given to them.

I can't speak to the security of other CMS providers. We feel our CMS is very secure and follows very strict PCI compliance. Our sites and servers are tested monthly.

Here are my responses to your highlighted items.

1. I'm not sure if you were aware that you were posting this comment on a website created by a company that has it's own custom built Church CMS. So, yes I have seen what a CMS looks like. I have taken part in the building and modifying of ours. I have also used all of the ones that you mentioned.

2. A good CMS will help you be searchable. We put a lot of effort into making our CMS very SEO friendly and our clients have benefited from it greatly. So, you could say ours was designed with SEO in mind. We have page titles and URLs that will get searched and we give the ability to have whatever TITLE and DESCRIPTION you want per page. Of course, since it's a CMS, the data that's entered is up to the end user.

We recognize that the code matters. But again, more importantly, the end user should be writing relevant content. Google changed the way websites are crawled because of people overusing META and DESCRIPTION tags. They want people to search and find content that is relevant based on what's written on the page and not what's added to a tag. Google likes links. And not just links that say “click here.” They want to see descriptive links. Again, this is based on the content that is written and not the actual CMS itself.

Making a website SEO friendly takes effort. Nothing can be built out of the box that is instantly SEO friendly. Similarly, it takes work to make a static website SEO friendly. We (iMinistries) give you all the tools necessary to add SEO value to your website. Our CMS is easy to use and we give the ability to make your website as SEO friendly as you want.

On 2/28/02012 4:25 PM, Josh Burns said... Wow, I think this is a great breakdown of a good online presence for a church.

Great work!

I love info graphs and I love that you all took the time to do this one.

Thanks!

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What Makes a Healthy Online Presence for Churches? [INFOGRAPHIC]

Technology

Social Media

Design/UX

The Infographic

@iMinistries