I’m glad to hear that your starting to think about how people find your site and what the visitor’s experience is like. Is it true that many people will arrive at the website by accident? Well, I suppose that depends on what you mean. If you mean many people can arrive at your site without having originally intended to go to your specific site, then yes, many people do arrive at websites that way. However, those people were most likely looking for a site like yours, just not specifically your site. If you mean that the people are just surfing the web without even purposely looking for a site like your site and they just happen to end up at your site, then no, that doesn’t happen that often. If you have a church site for example, the people were probably looking for a church, or some service that the church offers, or something like that. They weren’t out looking for a lawnmower and somehow ended up on the church site.

It is important to consider what the visitor’s experience is and a homepage especially should draw a person into the website. Like you said, you need to give the person a reason to look around your site. That can be done by offering information about other things than what your primary purpose is (I assume the church websites you are referring to aren’t primarily trying to be a source for nature trail activities :); however, this can also be done by offering intriguing information about what your main focus is. A church can draw people in talking about the church, its activities, sermons, etc. One particular way you can do this is by using interesting or exciting titles for things.

It’s good that your starting to think about what people experience when they get to your site, but if your strategy for getting people to your website is to hope they just find your website by accident, I’m afraid you won’t get many visitors. If you started a brick and mortar clothing store, would you just rent a store somewhere and hope people came in and bought your clothes or would you put a sign out front, place an add in the yellow pages, hand out flyers, put up a billboard, etc. The same is true of a website, regardless of whether it’s a business, church, school, or poetry site. If you want people to visitor your site, you have to go out and get them. You have to make your site visible to the people looking for a site like you have. You have to market the site.

If you build it, they will come. Sure it’s an over-used movie reference; unfortunately, it’s also all too often the mindset of people when they build a website. Creating a successful website with significant online presence takes more than spendi…