You know how important it is to ask questions before making a big purchase. Whether it’s a car, a house, or an expensive gift, you want to fully understand the product and what your experience will be like after the sale.
This is why you should be able to take a test-drive, taste a sample, or try on products before you invest in them––and your church website is no different!
Trying a website demo gives you the opportunity to see the type of customer service, web experience, and features you’re going to get in the future. Doing a demo benefits you, the creator of the website, because it helps you discover if you and the website company are a good fit. They should be working hard to suit your needs and answer your questions.
So before you sign on the dotted line, we have a few tips to help you ensure you have the best possible church website demo experience:
1. Utilize the materials the website company gives you.
The website company you’re “interviewing” should be trying to help you succeed. When you began your demo, were you given any help or other resources to use in your research? While it might be easy to brush off the extra documents that come your way by email, all of that content was created to help you. Use the video tutorials, FAQ sheets, or icon guides to help you through this process. They can probably answer your initial questions right away! The system you’re testing might look confusing at first––but by reading these helpful notes or watching video tutorials first, you'll be more familiar with the feel and format of it once you actually log in.
2. Contextualize the features and processes.
In a similar vein, ask questions if something makes you confused. Don't just dismiss the whole project if you can’t find a button or don’t know how to publish a post at first. There may be simple changes or solutions that you need to contextualize before deciding that any given website option is or is not the best fit for your church website needs.
3. Create events and try out your normal routine.
What do you do every day on your church website? What's critical to your operations? These should be some of your top priority questions while you’re demo-ing. Post a sermon, promote an event, and test out how to upload files. See if you can customize some of the pages to your church branding and color schemes––customization can help you feel more at-home and visualize what your live website would look like!
4. Create a page.
While you’re poking around in these processes, make sure you test out one more critical action: creating a page. Your website structure is mainly built around a sitemap of pages. Your critical paths matter to your users, so you should be testing what those paths will look like once your site is live and fully functioning. How simple is it for you to build new pages? How does this fit into the web experience your church members want (and need) in order to use your website to its potential?
5. Don't overthink it.
You might spend a few hours in a couple different church website demos before you’re able to decide if it would be a good fit for your online ministry. But remember that you have plenty of time to take a break, try again, and ask more questions. Give yourself the space to breathe and reflect! Be honest with your opinions, but also try to let your instincts guide you. If you’re still struggling to navigate and understand the system after a few tries, refocus your energy on another one.
Also remember to be transparent with the customer service or sales team assisting you. Ask how much help you’ll receive during the transition time, and even months after when you want to make some updates. It's helpful for their team to identify your experience level and needs so that they can suit you better. But if you get stuck during the demo, can't get ahold of your representative, or just don't have a good experience with customer care in general––that's a red flag that you'll be on your own in the future.
