For first-time visitors
- Service times on the home page, including seasonal and holiday changes.
- Address, parking and which door to use.
- What to expect: how long services are, what people wear, what happens for children.
- Photos of the real congregation and building.
- Who to contact with questions, with a phone number.
For members
- Events and ministries, kept current. A calendar from last spring tells visitors the website is abandoned.
- Livestream and past sermons.
- Online giving through a reputable processor or giving platform, with the card handled by them, never entered into a form on the church’s own site.
- Prayer requests through a form that sends privately.
Run by volunteers
- Make the parts that change often (events, announcements) easy for a volunteer to update.
- Keep the domain and accounts in the church’s name, with more than one person able to log in.
- Turn on two-step sign-in. Churches are frequent targets of gift card scams sent “from the pastor”; a forged email from the church’s own domain makes them more convincing, which is what DMARC prevents.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.