Fill It Out With Highlights

We believe strongly that your church website can be a great tool for your ministry and help fulfill your ministry goals. As we've discussed before, two of the strongest contributions your site might make are:

• To connect new people with your ministry
• To help current visitors/attendees/members find new ways to "plug in"

Generally, people will visit your website looking for something specific. Let's call this "what they think they want."

• For someone who hasn't attended, this might be the service times or your statement of belief. 
• For a current attender, this might be the times of that prayer meeting or the e-mail address of one of your pastors. 
• For the member, this might be pictures of last weekend's retreat or your worship music archive.

But each of these visits also represents an opportunity for you to give them "what you think they need to know. Don't miss these opportunities.

• When the potential attender looks for service times, why not also show them how to become a believer, information about the new believer's class, and a link to a welcome letter or video from your pastor?
• When a current attender comes to find out about the prayer meeting, why not offer her some information about your membership classes?
• When a member comes to see pictures, why not show him a volunteer posting for next year's retreat?

Your iMinistries website has what we call highlights. Highlights are simply "slots" in the margins of a page where you can place a sort of mini-ad for another item on your site. Each highlight shows the item's thumbnail, the title, and a brief summary. Each page can have up to five highlights. Highlights can be explicitly selected or you can have the system present a random highlight on the page.

Highlights are great for "filling out a page," but their more important goal is to direct visitors to other potentially interesting content. This is, after all, one of the distinct advantages to the Web as a communication vehicle--users can and will click around to see more information. We track the use of highlights in our sites, and we've found that, when they are presented, users click them. Are you using them?