Church + House of Worship, Church Website Design, Custom Website Builder
Your church’s website plays a crucial role in connecting and engaging with your congregation and community. By staying up to date with the latest features, trends, and best practices in website design, your church can create and maintain a compelling online presence that reflects your values, mission, and purpose. And attract new visitors to your church.
In this article, we explore some established and emerging church website themes and design trends — including the importance of storytelling through video. We also cover the essential features you’ll want to include in your church’s website experience to ensure it remains engaging and relevant for your visitors.
To learn more about creating and maintaining a great church website with Sites, start a 14-day free trial to see how it works.
According to the National Congregational Study Survey, there are an estimated 380,000 churches in the United States. Approximately 69% to 78% of them have websites and an online presence.
An effective website serves as a critical tool for outreach, communication, and community engagement. While all congregations and community needs vary, there are some common functions and purposes a church website serves:
When building your website, it’s important to include features and content that communicate your church's mission and provide clear, easy-to-find information. Some key elements the best church websites have include:
The world of web design is constantly evolving. Advancements in technology have considerable impacts on trends and capabilities. As web browsers, devices, and connections become faster, they enable new approaches, tactics, and techniques. Design conventions and patterns that were once considered cutting edge can quickly become overused, clunky, and dull in the process.
We’ve put together a list of emerging and established church website themes and trends that are likely to be mainstays in 2024 — and beyond.
Sites are leveraging dense, complex, and colorful textures, patterns, and graphics that create immersive visual experiences for visitors. This shift can be seen as a welcome change from the clean and minimalistic approach to web design that’s dominated the landscape for the past decade. As computing power increases, so do the outputs, quality, and complexity of visuals that are able to be imagined, created, and communicated.
User experience (UX)-focused design principles are foundational to church web design and aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Many websites, website building platforms, and templates will continue to leverage and implement UX best practices to maximize lead generation and conversions.
Every interaction or touchpoint is designed with the user in mind. Everything — the navigation bar, hero image, headline, animations/videos, and text — is structured to engage visitors from the first few seconds. Every piece of information on screen should be direct and immediately convey what your church has to offer and how it can benefit your readers.
The need for optimized “above the fold” content continues to diminish as new generations of web users are more accustomed to varying devices, screen sizes, and scrolling. Like a giant billboard, using a large, full-screen hero image can focus your visitors’ attention on messaging.
Full-screen hero sections provide ample opportunities for creative storytelling. And when combined with tasteful animations and parallax scrolling effects, the possibilities become limitless. Just keep in mind that hero images and videos will crop and display differently based on browser and device dimensions — be sure to plan (and design) accordingly.
Giant typography is a trend that’s gaining popularity in web design. Large letterforms laid out in artful display fonts can be used to create a bold, attention-grabbing visual statement. This technique is often used to highlight key info or messaging, creating a sense of scale, focus, and personality.
Mobile-first design is an approach to designing websites and user interfaces that prioritizes the mobile user experience. It involves starting the design process with the smallest screen, i.e., a mobile phone, and then scaling up to larger screens like tablets and desktops. This approach is important due to the widespread usage of mobile devices to access the web — approximately 54% of overall web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Video storytelling is a powerful strategy that helps address the challenge of capturing the increasingly short attention spans of audiences. By telling compelling stories, your church can creatively convey its message, evoke emotions, and call the community to take action. There are a number ways video storytelling can be utilized on websites for churches:
The landscape of church web design is constantly evolving. Trends, tools, and technologies come and go. Remember: What matters most is effectively connecting and engaging with your congregation and community.
BoxCast’s church website builder, Sites, provides a selection of premade church website templates that feature modern, responsive designs — with useful features that are ready from the start. Layouts are fully customizable and easy to update.
Want to learn more? Get a quick demo of Sites from one of our friendly experts. You can also give these posts a read:
© 2024 BoxCast. All Rights Reserved. | +1-888-392-2278