Comments on: Top 10 Church Website Activities… Maybe

By: VIRGINA KLEEZ

VIRGINA KLEEZ — Wed, 16 May 2012 07:28:08 +0000

Absolutely right, I do agree with your post. By the way I work for church. We use web based church management software of Congregation Builder. It’s easy to enter data, and print reports. Church Web Calendar is really good application by this we can manage the events for church & lots more options available.

By: Top church web site - Hosting site - Top web site

Top church web site - Hosting site - Top web site — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 04:43:30 +0000

[…] Top 10 Church Website Activities… Maybe | Christian Web Trends Blog 24 Mar 2009. Recently Drew Goodmanson of Monk Development published some survey results concerning how people use their church websites. Here are the top Top 10 Church Website Activities… Maybe | Christian Web Trends Blog […]

By: Air Jordan

Air Jordan — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 21:03:29 +0000

It just shows that experience in writing brings such depth and meaning to readers. Thanks for sharing. Air Jordan

By: Paul Steinbrueck

Paul Steinbrueck — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:07:16 +0000

Great questions, Matt. In addition to be relevant to the research Drew is doing they could make for a good blog and podcast topics. 😉

By: Matt Farina

Matt Farina — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:49:39 +0000

Looking at the stats of where people go on your site is one thing. But, learning about your users is something else.

Where are they? Are they locally looking at you site? I know a church that got a lot of international traffic because of a podcast they did. It wasn’t expected. Knowing it was international let them not assess it’s local success too hastily.

What kind of system are they on? What’s the OS? What’s the screen resolution? This can tell you a bit about the users. If you have a heavy concentration of mac users that’s something to note. That’s a specific demographic.

Where does your traffic come from? Is there a link sending them there? Are they going there directly? This can tell you about their browsing habits and what else is going on.

I don’t actually know my churches goals with the website at the moment. But, I do wonder what the goals of your church websites are and how that relates to the great commission.

By: Don

Don — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:40:21 +0000

Thanks for this conversation, guys. It sure helps me when thinking about goals for my site and how well we are meeting them.

By: Paul Steinbrueck

Paul Steinbrueck — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:16:40 +0000

Hey Matt, thanks for your comment. I agree. I’d say metrics answer the question “Are we meeting our goals?” While a general review of site statistics/analytics can answer the question “What’s going on here?” Reviewing metrics consistently is a must. But a periodic review of statistics/analyics can be very revealing too.

By: Drew Goodmanson

Drew Goodmanson — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:08:29 +0000

Matt, good point. Yes we have and are identifying goals that we are using to create metrics. So we measure goals we believe churches should have, evaluate their analytics and survey their people to reflect these.

By: Matt Farina

Matt Farina — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:19:22 +0000

I’m a fan of metrics over statistics. With a metric you have a goal and then you track that goal and how well you are doing at it. Every church website should have a goal. What is the goal of yours? To tell people about you and where you’re at? To be a place people go when they find you on google maps? To be a place that helps coordinate and communicate with your congregation? Some combination of these? Something else?

If you have a goal you can see what’s going on. For example, if you have a goal of helping people locally find your church you can see how many people locally are looking at your site vs. people out of the area. You can look to see how many people are looking up your site locally before an event or Sunday morning.

Surveys can come in handy but need to be carefully done. They can help you capture information about the people visiting your site. The do not tell you about people in general. The questions have to be carefully asked to get useful answers.

Analyzing stats on a website and a survey run there isn’t going to provide enough useful information. Without a goal you don’t know how to analyze your data. Without specifics you don’t know the points to measure.

I would start with goals and work them into metrics. Then look to where and how to analyze that. It will be more useful in the end.

By: Drew Goodmanson

Drew Goodmanson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:27:20 +0000

Paul, yes as we spoke about on the phone I recognize the limitations of of surveys. I think David Kinnaman (President of Barna Group) calls these types of surveys “Info Porn”.