Church Web Design Part 10: A Website Organization Exercise

In part 9 of this series about the redesign of my church’s website, I outlined 12 principles for organizing a church website.  Today we’ll take a practical look at applying those principles by examining how Tim, our church’s executive pastor, and I organized our church’s new website.  We used a neat little exercise that allowed us to quickly look at several different organizational options.  You might find it helpful as well.

Get Out!
Our church’s existing website had been organized into 5 main menu items:

• Get to Know Us
• Get Connected
• Get Informed
• Get Spiritual
• Get in Contact

That worked fine until the church revised its spiritual growth strategy around the concepts of spiritual “next steps” and “next step partnerships.”  The “Get” theme couldn’t be accommodated and a “Next Step” main menu item was added, which looked out of place.

Having learned our lesson, the “Get” theme was abandoned completely with the new site.  But, we still had to figure out how what options should be in the main menu and which main menu item each page/function should fall under.

The Post-It Note Exercise
Tim had a great idea that I think could help a lot of church’s organize their website better.  He wrote some possible main menu headings on Post-It notes and stuck them on the wall.  Then he wrote the title of each page and each component (newsletter, sermon blog, photo gallery, etc) on a Post-It note.  One by one he put each page and component under a main menu heading.

On the first attempt we ended up with 3 problems.

1. There was a yet to be named menu that about a dozen ministries under it (children, middle school, high school, women, music/drama, compassion, and on and on)
2. We had a menu item call “news, events, and sermons,” a name that wouldn’t fit into the menu space.
3. We had a handful of pages that didn’t really fit anywhere.

Because we used Post-It notes we were able to easily move things around and quickly visualize new structures.  Eventually we were able to resolve all 3 of those issues:

1. While trying to figure out how to organize all those ministries we realized that those pages were really serving two different purposes and intended for two different audiences.  Some of the pages were intended for people who were looking for community and looking to be served (children, middle school, high school, women’s ministry), so we placed them under a “Community” heading.  Other pages were intended for people who were looking to volunteer and serve others (compassion ministry, music/drama, etc), and were placed under a new “Volunteer” heading.  Eventually, several of those ministries like children and youth will have pages in both sections.
2. We realized that News, Events, and Sermons really should be separated into two menu groups as well, a Sunday Services, which includes a page on the current series, the sermon blog, and sermon audio, and a News & Calendar section, which includes news, the calendar, the newsletter subscription and archives, and information on the building program.
3. After taking care of the first two issues, the items that previously didn’t fit well under any of the original 5 main menu items, then fit into one of the 7 main menu items in the “final” structure.

The main menu we ended up with looked like this:

• New to Cypress
• Sunday Messages
• Community
• Volunteer
• News & Calendar
• Spiritual Growth
• Contact Us

The full menu structure with its sub-menus is too long to post here, but you can visit CypressMeadows.org to see it (the new site is now live, these blog articles lag behind actual development by a few weeks).

“Final” structure?  Yeah, Right!
One last thought when it comes to the menus and structure of a church website.  They shouldn’t be set in stone.  As mentioned in Church Web Design Part 9: 12 Principles for Organizing a Church Website, the structure of a church website will depend on its mission, priorities, and content.  If those things develop and change over time, then so should the structure of the website.  (BTW, that’s another good reason to invest in a content management system.  It makes adding, moving, and renaming menus a piece of cake.)

Keep an eye out for menus that have gotten too long because lots of pages have been added.  There could be a need for additional sub-menus.  Look for menus that have a hodge-podge of pages/functionality in them.  That may indicate some reorganization is needed.

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