Peachtree City UMC in Georgia just launched their new website this past week and they could not be more pleased with the outcome.
Working with Reach Right to create our website was an outstanding process from the first meetings to the day it launched. Their team was able to capture our specific church brand and to help us put together a website with that is easy to navigate, and speaks to our current members as well as those looking for church information in our community. Reach Right’s attention to detail made a potentially overwhelming project manageable and enjoyable. – Sondra Naber Brown, Communications Director & Executive Assistant to the Senior Pastor
We were excited to work with them on their website project. This church utilizes their website a ton, so they wanted to make sure that we could design a site that would be user-friendly for their current members, yet also speak to potential visitors. Peachtree City has a special community and they are very big on community events and service. They needed to be able to upload registration forms, link to registration forms and they wanted to be able to show past events via videos.
Video
Adding videos to your website whether they are background videos, welcome videos, testimonies, or event highlights, they are always an easy, great way to let a website user take a peek at what is going on at your church.
Homepage background videos are usually a montage of either images or short clips of life around the church – greeting, the church building, worship, prayer, kids/youth ministry, etc. Those kinds of videos are always recommended if you have the professional resources to put that together.
Welcome videos are a good way for the pastor and leadership to introduce themselves to a potential visitor and give a short blurb about their vision and mission for the church. This can help a website visitor know who to look for if they decide to visit and maybe better know what to expect during a service. Especially at larger churches, these can help ease a visitor by making the pastor more personable by getting that one-on-one time per say.
Testimony videos are a newer concept that is starting to catch on more and more. These are short videos of real church members sharing a personal story -their personal testimony of salvation, reasons to join a small group, a quick story of how coming to ______ church has changed their lives, etc. These are great and can show a visitor what kinds of transformations are happening and how to get involved.
Accent Colors and Branding
Let’s talk colors. We know that people gravitate to more visually appealing things. White and black are elegant and classy, but if you are wanting to capture attention and highlight areas on your website that are important to you, you may need to add some color and some visual graphics. We see more logos containing colors versus in the past that were just black and white. Doing so can help add that pop to your website and that pop carries over in different areas.
Peachtree City has four main colors that are in their logo and we took those and used them all over as great accent colors for visuals. Buttons, icons, links, background page colors – there were a lot of options we had to make things that were important to this client stand out by using those.
For example, they really wanted their student/youth page to have a ‘fun, energetic’ feel to it. Adding in images of happy kids, celebrations at church and bringing in those accent colors all around the page helps to give that page the look and feel that they were going for.
Social Media
We have mentioned this before, but social media is almost a must these days to promote and connect with members and visitors. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vimeo, Youtube – all of these are ways to allow your members and families to keep up with what is happening at the church and a great way for you to promote events. Using those outlets allows people to share those with non-followers of your social media and we know how fast things spread via social media, so why not keep your people plugged in! Some churches have different plugs for their ministries – their youth groups will have their own pages where they post events, gatherings, small group information and even just inspirational materials.
Don’t forget that the internet can be very beneficial to your ministry. Peachtree City knows that their members use their website to gather together and keep up with what is going on at their church, and also know that they want to reach others outside the walls of their building. What better way to revamp their website and do just that!
Let ReachRight give your website a review and let us see how we can get your website looking and functioning at it’s best! Click HERE to request a free website review.
