Call to Action
June 24, 2010 - 9:59am
July 7, 2010 - 10:05pm
A call to action needs to be contextual
This is something I continually try to remind people, especially those developing websites - a website is just another facet of your organization's efforts to communicate your message.
Not too long ago, there was an episode on user aware websites and that is a critical component of this discussion. How does your pastor react to you when you walk into church? With familiarity and an individual greeting, I hope. Now, how does that same pastor react when a new face walks into church? Hopefully, not with the same greeting you received.
Two of the best examples of a consistent and contextual call to action is Amazon or YouTube - each of them do everything they can to tailor the experience to the current visitor, recommending content and customizing the next step based on who you are and your past experience with them. This is not an easy thing to do for the average site maintainer.
It is important for a church to recognize they do have different contexts for visitors to their site and make no assumptions with their information architecture. Are your website visitors local? Are they members of your church? How do you know? Before you determine the next step, you need to better understand the first step - what brought them to your site? NP was on the mark when he said the #1 call to action is 'to facilitate communication'. Regardless of the situation, think of the user experience as a dialogue. Within seconds of the dialogue beginning, you will determine the context of the conversation and steer the dialogue based on that context. A very simple and quick determination the visitor is viewing your site with a mobile browser gives you a perfect context - they are on the move and will more likely be looking for location or contact information than programs or doctrine.
In real estate, it's location, location, location. On the web - it's context, context, context.
Steve
Hey everybody, check it out. Here's a sneak peek at July's intro topic and your chance to join the conversation early! Reply here or (better yet) call the new voice mail number at 313-444-2634 and leave a comment, and we may use it on the podcast.
On the Boagworld web design podcast, Paul Boag frequently advocates the concept that every website should have an immediately recognizable call to action, and that every page of the website should lead users to completing that call to action.
Given that as a premise, what calls to action should a church website contain, and how should pages lead users to that call to action? How effective is the church at following this model, and how could we improve?