Once you start to understand the global and local reaches of the web, it can be difficult to fight the urge to try and reach out as far as you can. The internet allows vast amounts of information to be shared almost instantaneously across towns, states, countries and continents. But be careful not to put the horse before the cart.

Realistically as a faith based organization or church your “ministry” involves people, yourselves and God. Your site should be a carefully designed and purposed portal that connects All three of these together.

So who are your people?

First we need to remove ourselves from the web world to help orient ourselves as to where we should begin. What is it that you offer people and what would you like to offer people? Is it relationships, instructions, products, guidance, entertainment, information, connection, other? I would heavily recommend that you take a moment and actually list out what exactly it is that you do and offer. Once you’ve finished the list order it by priority. Who you are and what you do directly effects who you should be trying to reach.

Now that you have a list of services and priorities we can start to apply these to a groups of people.

It may help for me to use an example so, lets say that you are a relief type organization. This organization focusses on bringing food resources to states within the US after disasters. What we do as an organization are say…

- Provide food and medical supplies to effected areas
- Organize people to help distribute supplies
- Train people to handle disaster relief
- Raise donations and funds
- Represent Christ and his love

This is just an example so your list could very between 5 and 100 or even more items.

The next step is to take this list and examine each item for which group of people might be related to each item.

My First Item – “Provide food and medical supplies to effected areas”

-This item might bring in people who are being directly effected by a disaster and want to know why or what exactly this organization does.
-It could attract organizations who want to donate or supply food and medical supplies.
-Other people could come to learn about what it is that you do, and possibly make a donation.

These three people groups may be very different.

The group being relieved may be in a location where internet isn’t reliable and even slow or spotty, since they are in a disaster area. This may affect what you may want for a download time and connection requirement (Less images and smaller files). People in this category could be using any type of computer even older models running operating systems and web browsers that are older than 6 or 7 years (This would effect site coding techniques).

The second group of people might be using a business internet connection and computer provided by their company or organization (This may mean faster speeds and newer systems). If they are looking into donating supplies and resources. This group could expand outside of the direct relief zones and cover any person that knows about your name via businesses or a corporate setting.

The third group of people might be best represented by a normal home users who finds themselves on your site via an ad or promotional piece. They could go either way as far as internet connection and computer age.

Based on just this one item and these three user groups I would recommend creating a site that wouldn’t be to Image or file heavy (small or less images and videos) but it could link to a section of the site to make it optional for users to view a gallery or video instead of placing it on the homepage. This will allow the home page to load quickly but still leave users with the option to go to a more content heavy section if they choose.

Since donations are a vital part of this organization I would definitely place a large “How can you help” (donation) link which would bring them to a donation page where they can collect information on what types of donations are needed. Perhaps also a blurb about becoming a regular supporter or member.

Since this is a relief organization and some of the users will be people who have directly been effected by the organization it might be a great idea to incorporate a link for people to send a thank you message for the help that organization x did. This could be represented by a “Tell your story” button that links to a form where people can submit their story.

Brainstorming through a list like this would allow you to start to see why users would be coming to your site. Then based on that information you update or build your site to best serve the users needs. A combination of your priorities and the needs of the users will define the most important parts of the site which you may want to accent on the homepage to streamline a users needs or at least make sure they are easy to use and find.

For those of you who already have an existing site I would STRONGLY recommend setting up a Google Analytics account (it’s free). Google Analytics captures loads of information about who is visiting your site, what type of computer and browser they are using and how long they spend on your site. Go To Google Analytics