The best church websites today are mobile-friendly, meaning they work on any device. That eliminates about half of all church websites from our list immediately. Next, the website needs to look good on those devices. A few other must-haves for churches include a contact page with a form instead of an email address to eliminate spam, an interactive map, an interactive calendar, and a sensible balance between static content and blog (news) articles. When you have all that, then you can start to look at images, color choices, image galleries, and other nifty add-ons. The problem is, very few church websites really finish the basics before they move on to something else. What follows is a list of several church sites that have made the right choices in both form and function. lutheranism
Grace Lutheran - Elkhart Lake, WI
This website went from basic to beautiful in less than a week.
This website has great contrasting colors and a simple look, but it also has an extensive menu with all of the necessary pages to show off its technical features. It’s not too heavy with images, but the main image looks beautiful with the other color options. A visitor would assume the church is modern yet welcoming of new people.
This website fun, but not so much fun that it takes away from the function. In fact, the compressed top menu makes it simple to navigate, while the animated images keep a first-time explorer engaged on the front page. It’s bright yellow and bright blue, but with enough white space to keep it all under control.
This website looks like a fashion designer had a hand in putting it together, with soft purples and blues that provide nice contrast while reflecting the hues of the front page rotating images. Everything fits so nicely together that it seems like a visitor would probably fit in very well at this church, too. shepherd
Using a sidebar as an image gallery might not normally make sense, but this church is about verticals, so it makes a lot of sense here. The contrasting blue and red liven up the site with a bit of passion, with the tan bringing it back to its conservative roots. The focus on history and imagery is the right choice for such a photogenic church.
Honorable Mention - Luthernet.org Website Design
A website design company should have a pretty good looking website. It has all the fun you need on the main page, but it’s coupled with all the information you need on the other pages. In fact, you might want to see some of the church sites built by Luthernet after seeing its own site.
See the transformation of the older versions of the sites above in this video:
The websites above are LCMS, but LutherNet will help your WELS, ELCA, or any other denomination dominate the LutherNet.