Rob over at Effective Web Ministry Notes was blogging my post about pet stores yesterday and brought up some good additions to my list of things which make church websites unfriendly.

I commented on his site and ended up sharing an example of how a church website I developed a couple of years ago tried to be visitor-centric. I thought the example might be helpful to my readers here, so I’m going to repeat some of my comment to Rob. But you should definitely visit Rob’s post as well because he has some valuable insights to add.

That being said, read on to learn about the example.

When I developed a website for a local church in our area a couple of years ago, we purposefully created a series of profiles of believers within the church and then put a headline section (a small thumbnail photo of the profiled believer and a text portion to catch attention) on the front page which pointed to those profiles.

Some of these headlines were:

1. Are you a musician? Click here to read how a man and his friends are sharing their stories through their love of music and their talents.

2. Are you spiritual? Click here to read how a man’s hunger for genuineness led him along a turning spiritual path until he made a surprising discovery.

3. Are you an actor? Click here to read how a man’s love of acting is being fulfilled as he lives out his childhood dream.

4. Do you have Hepatitis C? Click here to find out how a fellow survivor finds joy in life despite this virus which is more widespread than HIV and is soon expected to surpass AIDS in annual deaths.

5. Do you love auto racing? Click here to read how a champion driver finds satisfaction in life through devoting his life to a greater cause.

6. Are you an artist? Click here to read about someone who finds joy in his involvement with the visual arts.

7. Addicted to alcohol? Click here to read how a man who had everything discovered he really had nothing and how he was given a second change in life.

8. Do you like swimming? Click here to read about a fifteen-year-old who has excelled at competitive swimming despite the challenges of leukemia.

9. Do you have cancer? Click here to to read about a fifteen-year-old who has triumphed over leukemia by relying on her family and on her faith.

In the profiles, the believers shared about their interests and life experiences and how their relationship with Jesus integrated with those interests and experiences.

One problem we did encounter is that once the initial profiles were up, the church leadership seemed to feel that the site was done and didn’t see any need for further profiles. From my perspective, I felt like the more profiles we put up on the site, the wider reach the site would have.

In spite of that problem, I believe this is a very effective approach to introducing unbelievers to the life of the Christian community (especially if it were to be combined with allowing profiled believers to have their own sections of the site through which they could interact with site visitors - but that’s a big step for most churches!).

Unfortunately (at least from my perspective), the church in question has decided to go a different direction with their website, but this is one approach that I think would make our church websites more visitor-friendly.