Professional Designer Spills Church Website Secrets

At LPi, when a church asks us to redesign their website, we connect them with our in-house team of talented graphic designers. These designers then work alongside parishes to design beautiful websites for their communities that can be easily updated by church staff after the initial design process is finished — all using WeConnect, our powerful and user-friendly website builder. This week we had the opportunity to speak with one of our designers, Heidi, about her experience guiding a church through the website redesign process.

Q. Hi Heidi, Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us! To start — When redesigning a site for a parish, what’s the first thing you consider? 

A. Hi! The first thing we consider is the church’s design preferences. We base all of our design choices on trying to best represent each individual parish. Do they have a branding? If so, what are their brand colors? What are their brand fonts? If they don’t have a branding, what colors are they drawn to? What fonts? Are they more drawn to icons or photos? 

Q. What do you think is important for every parish to feature on their website? 

A. Features we see most often are Mass Schedules, Bulletins/Newsletters, Pastor’s Notes, and Calendars/Upcoming Events. The most important, though, in my opinion, is clear and easy to find contact information. That way, anyone who wants to show up for a Mass or ask a question can find what they need — including all of the sections most featured.

Q. What makes working with WeConnect a good experience? What are some WeConnect features you like to use?

A. In WeConnect, the drag and drop sections are very easy to use, even for those who may be inexperienced in website design. I like to use them as a starting point to create something unique. The global styles are great too! You can set colors and font header styles for use throughout the entire site and this feature makes keeping consistency very easy.

Q. Are the staff members of churches able to update and maintain their website through WeConnect after you design it for them?

A. Yes — First LPi works out the site design and navigation for the parish’s website. We focus on the design of the home page as well as two additional pages so the church can see some examples of how to best use the WeConnect sections for their content. We then work with the church to get the design approved and we also make sure to train their staff to make updates to the site by themselves. Of course, we do help out if the parish needs extra support and are also available to answer questions.

Q. Are there any cool widgets that you use?

A. I’m a big fan of the social media widget. You can select icons, or even add your own, to feature only the social media options that are a focus for your church. There’s another widget, our ParishesOnline widget, that allows for their current church bulletin to be automatically updated on their website each week!

Q. What design aspects do you focus on to make a church’s community look inviting to visitors?

A. It’s important to show quality photos of the church, both of the building and of the church community. Having the building is nice because if you’re visiting you can see exactly what you should be looking for, plus many church buildings have beautiful architecture. However, only having pictures of the building can seem a bit cold, so to add that welcoming factor you should also feature photos of the people in the community. 

Q. What else might be important to add?

A. A large percentage of site views happen on cell phones, and that number is only going to grow. WeConnect is great at translating pages created throughout the site to the mobile platform, so church content is shown at its best no matter where you’re viewing it!

A huge thanks to Heidi for sharing her thoughts as a web designer! If this interview inspired you to take a closer look at your parish’s website and, in doing so, you think you’d benefit from a professional redesign, we’ve got you covered. You might even get to work with Heidi! To learn more about our website building tool, WeConnect, be sure to attend one of our free demos. If, instead, you want to jump right into learning more about our website design services, here’s what we have to offer! 

For more inspiring content to help you level-up your parish's web presence, check out the other articles on the "Web and Social Media" section of our blog.

Updated on 03-13-2024