On January 1st, the new Rio Texas Annual Conference will come into being. This new conference is a collection of churches from the, soon to be former, Southwest Texas Annual Conference and Rio Grande Annual Conference. In my new role (beginning in February) I will be equipping and empowering districts and churches to make better use of communications to reach their mission fields.

I thought I would use a couple of posts to celebrate some things that are going well. I am going to begin by featuring some of the churches in the new conference that have websites that work. I am not going to dig too deep here. The home page is the most important part.  If you look at the analytics of most church websites, nearly all the traffic originates there and the biggest number of dropoffs happen after viewing just one page.

First on the list, Servant Church Austin.

This is a beautiful website. What hits me at first is that the very first impression we get is of what kind of church this is.  This is a church that is about service.  So, an image of real people doing real service is worth a few thousand words.  The home page is clean and represents the church in imagery and also in the choice of navigation.  What a church provides as navigation buttons tells a visitor a lot about the church.  Too many buttons make it hard to read and make it hard to understand what the church is about.  Clearly, outreach and lifegroups are important to this church.  They offer one paragraph that gives a good written snapshot of the church as well.  And all of this is “above the fold.”  This is the front door.  If you can’t keep people’s attention, they won’t scroll and they won’t click.

Now, below the fold.

Great stuff here as well.  They had a broken link at the time I took the screenshot, but that happens sometimes.  Churches don’t usually have full-time webmasters. I love the content though. Recommended music, an easy link to giving, a view of the blog, sermons and a map.  Front page stuff.

This website works.  Many people now use a church’s website as the front door. Most people won’t come near a church until they have taken a peek at the website.  Servant Church demonstrates what they are about in a clear, clean way.

Take a full tour at servantchurchaustin.org