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Religious website design is a whole science to master before you build your congregation project.
This kind of design concerns to churches, non-profits, and modern organizations with different beliefs. Such a website can be private, i.e. oriented on the members only and with the password protected parameters. Another option is an open site for regular users and the newcomers who will either join your organization or not. Depending on the target audience of the website, its aim and scope, you need to fill the layout with appropriate content and define the end result this project should bring you.
The evolution of religious web design allows us to say that modern church projects are far from being trivial or poorly designed, as it was a couple of decades ago, and there is an elementary set of options to use for making your site truly magnificent:
Clean Style vs. Grunge Style
Both of these styles are much in use and the type of your institution causes the right design to pick. Thereby, an Orthodox church is better to be presented on a clean style website with much light, white space and clean layout.
Still, a mass of modern churches (megachurches, sects and cults) design their sites with the grunge elements. These are non-traditional organizations that hold their meetings in large halls and have a kind of light shows with electronic music. Grunge style in web design helps to express the individuality of these memberships and create exceptional online themes. The main features of the grunge style are:
- dirty background textures;
- irregular geometry (lines, shapes, frames);
- paper clips, pins;
- hand-written or hand-drawn details.
Religious websites don’t usually use all of these features, but a few of them are often-to-see.
Clean Website Design for NewSpring Church
Stonebriar Community Church Web Design with Grunge Elements
Natural Colors
Natural colors dominate on any church website style. Even if it is a grunge design where dull and subdued colors dominate, you will definitely find brown shades (the color of Earth) there. Other nature related colors are blue and green. Blue is the color of sky and water, it is often used on the background as sky/cloud textures. Green is the color of plants and the presence of it gives an eco-friendly look to a religious website.
Religious Website Design with Green Elements
The Riverside Church Site with Blue Background
Blue Website for African Methodist Episcopal Church
Newspaper Look
Newspaper style is a popular one in website design, because it allows you to make a content-rich website, and do it in a right way. Newspaper design is characterized by the multi-column layout, much media content (images, videos, audios), catchy headlines to the text articles and neutral color palette. Here I mean any of the classic tones: white, black, beige, and gray.
The United Methodist Church Website with Newspaper Design
Westboro Baptist Church Website with Newspaper Style Design
Header Image
Using a large wide photograph in the Header website section is trendy today and religious websites keep pace with the times. It may be a stuck image, a slider or different pictures for different pages. This kind of photos usually depicts the members of the church, happy families or the world around us.
The Header image serves for a few purposes: it makes the home page personalized and inviting, plus it is a good background for the navigation menu bar or your welcoming words to visitors.
Adventist Beliefs Website with Huge Image in the Header
Marmon Website with Blue Navigation Menu and Header Image
Redeemer Presbyterian Church with Background Header Image
Bold Call to Action
This is what any website is done for – bring people to actions. Church websites can have call-to-action elements for people to enter the organization or donate. As a rule, these are buttons done in bright colors and placed either on the most prominent section of the home page or on every website page.
Moravian Church Website with Call-to-Action Button
Here the call to action is the ‘Buy the Book’ button.
Disciples of Crist Website with Donate Button
The ‘Online Giving’ Button calls to action on this website.
Event Calendar
Tell your visitors, either first time or frequent, about your upcoming activities, so that they can take part in them. A well-done calendar is a good tool to organize people and give theme fresh news about what is going on in your membership. Nevertheless, this feature is not the one to develop and forget, because it is necessary to update information and provide users with current events, but not those happened 2 years ago.
Trinity Wall Street Website with a Detailed Event Calendar
Saint Thomas Church with Clean Layout and Brief Calendar
Multicolored Website with a Calendar for Abyssinian Baptist Church
Real Life Church Site with Well-Organized Calendar
We would be glad to know your thoughts on this article and if you have more great examples of religious website design, please feel free to share them with us.
