Why build your website?

When you are building a website, the most important consideration is why. Why build your website? What do you want it to do? Here are the top three reasons.

Reason 1. To Announce

You might simply want to announce your existence. The easiest way to achieve that is with a simple one-page site.

My business partner and I used a one-page site for our joint venture company. It announced our business. It was very simple and super-fast to load.

But there is drawback to a one-page website. It is this: later if you want to upgrade to a many-page website, switching can be more complex (and laborious and expensive) than you might imagine.

It might be wiser to select website software that can do both a one-page site and a many-page site. Then in the future, if you decide to add new pages, it will be far easier. And cheaper.

That takes us to the next level:

Reason 2. To Inform

You might want to do more than announce. You might probably want to inform people:

Who you are
What you are doing
How they can get involved

When they visit a website, people look for things like those.

Let’s take church websites as an example. Here is the information I see at different church websites:

About Us
Contact Us
Location
Schedule
Sermon texts
Blog
Weekly Bulletin
Upcoming Events
Photo galleries
Today’s Scripture Readings
Ministry schedules
Submit a prayer request
Watch the latest sermon
Welcome Video
Sign up for our weekly newsletter email
Social Media connections

If a church website provides just half of those, it will be ahead of most of its peers.

But maybe you want to take it even further:

Reason 3. To Interact

Beyond announcing and informing, the next level is interacting. It means people can actively do things at your website.

Only a very few church websites have these “interact” features. In part, that is because they are more complex to build. But they are quite desirable, and people find them awesome.

Again taking church websites as an example, here are the interactions I see at church websites:

Become a member
Sign up for Ministries
Ask us a question
Online Giving
Event scheduling and RSVP

Conclusion

In this article, I asked you to consider strategy. I asked what you want your website to do. That question is like an architect asking how many floors and rooms you want in your future home.

Now in my next article I ask you to begin thinking about what you will say on each of those pages. That question is like an interior decorator asking what furniture and artwork you would like to put in each of the rooms of your future home.