You don’t. You can do it. You know blue is calming; you know green evokes growth and health. You probably know better than to use Comic Sans. You can look at a site and know you want to make yours “like that.” Why would you pay someone else to tell you what you already know you want?
The only problem with that question is that you may not actually know what you think you know. You’re an expert in counseling, preaching, ancient Greek, evangelism, or admin and event planning. You know how to lead a worship service or run a funding campaign. It’s ok if you’re not also an expert in church web design and user experience.
When you are working with a designer, you’re not just paying for someone to make something look a certain way. Your designer is a walking, talking wealth of information. You are paying for a person with expertise in creativity and problem solving (and in making things look a certain way). A good designer will skillfully use your specific church’s goals and vision to create a high-quality, effective--and also good looking--church website.
As misleading as the job title is, designers don’t just design. A large part of their job is to listen and interpret your goals into actionable features and design elements on your new church website. A good designer will educate and strategize with their client.
They shouldn’t just tell you the decisions they made but also why and how they made them. For example, a designer may choose to go with a simple and clean design. That is what they are doing. But a designer should also be able to tell you why they chose that direction as well as how that decision will help you meet your goals.
"I think our website design shows that [our designer] really was a good listener and really had a great sense of what we were trying to accomplish, and I think we gave her good input." - Lori Hahn, Encounter Bible Fellowship
Designers can come up with innovative and striking ways to work toward your goals. And they can find which way is best suited to your church’s actual needs.
A very popular go-to site has been http://thevillagechurch.net/. Everyone wants to copy what they did for their church website design. And for good reason, it’s a great site. It’s a clean design with full-width images. It not only looks nice, but it’s right on the cutting edge of what’s in style today.
But the brilliance of their site is in why and how they did things. The Village Church purposefully organized their content the way their audience wants to see it, meeting the communication goals that were important to them.And here we have Port City Community Church’s campus menu (http://www.portcitychurch.org/), simliar information is presented but it is designed differently based on a separate set of needs and goals. The addition of the map is intentional and to show the general area the church is located. Port City Church has fewer services, so presenting them as buttons, as opposed to the text list you see on The Village’s site, makes their services stand out more.
Creativity and Problem Solving only go so far. When the rubber hits the road, you need someone who’s been down that path before.
Simply copying another successful site may not be your best option. The Village Church’s audience may not be similar to yours and their goals are probably different from yours. And that’s why you need an expert designer. You need someone to not only pick a color scheme, but help with why and how your website will come together. An expert designer will not only help you make intentional design decisions to target your needs and goals, but can also come up with multiple solutions to achieve you goals. They can make sure that the color scheme or any particular “design element” fits with the unique personality of your specific church.
In a nutshell, you are not really paying for the “what,” of the design. Ideally, you’re bringing in a partner and paying for the “how” and “why,” the thinking and reasoning behind the design product.