Content for Your Congregation's Website

Simple Beginnings

New congregations have used this planting strategy with a lot of success: set up a simple, attractive website up as early as possible. Include something like the following to start:

Unitarian Universalist congregation coming to your community. If you would like to be invited to the first worship please sign up here: [information capture]. If you want to get involved right away please sign up here: [information capture].

Then feature an invitation to Unitarian Universalism in your own words and link to the UUA.org seeker section.

One emerging congregation got a stack of UU World magazines and put stickers on them that said, &quotUnitarian Universalist congregation coming to [town] this spring! [website].&quot They sprinkled the magazines around town (at the library, co-op, community center, YMCA, and the like) to great success. Contact growthresources@uua.org for more good ideas.

Content Tips

• Information to Include (Or Leave Out) of a Congregational Website includes a basic checklist of the critical information you'll want to include (or leave out) on your site.
   
• When we reconfigured the Information Architecture (IA) of UUA.org, we relied heavily on user input and user testing to maximize our chance of success. Here are some of the resources we used and the lessons we learned about Determining Navigation.
   
• People have different reading habits on the screen vs. on paper. The simple tips in Writing for the Web will help your authors maximize the readability of your site.
   
• Guidelines for Church Electronic Newsletters
   
• Review Your Site's Usability: Ask yourself these questions as you look again at the pages of your site—make sure you've got the basics covered.

Ready-Made Content

• Plug-In Social Media Content
  Use plug-ins from Facebook, Twitter, and the like to provide content from frequently-updated sources.
   
• Graphics & Banners
  Chalice art, ready-made banners, and UU photo resources can help beautify your site.

Online Donations

• Congregational treasurers offer some recommendations for accepting online donations or pledge payments.