Speaking as Middle Old person (ugh, what a nasty label), I must say more websites than not are ill-suited to seniors. What might be cool to a younger audience is frequently bewildering to the point-of-no-return to an older audience.

However, if you want to attract seniors (and I would think most churches would), it’s really not hard. With real estate, they say, it’s location, location, location. With sites for seniors, it’s fonts, fonts, fonts. In particular:

  1. Make the fonts larger. Personally, I end up squinting at a great many sites. Then I will ratchet up the font size. That’s no problem on a Mac (Command-plus is a myopic dream-come-true), but not so with Internet Explorer on a PC. If I increase the text size through the menu bar, it works for some sites, but not others. When it doesn’t work, it’s because the fonts are sized absolutely – a big no-no in web design, but all too common.
  2. San serif fonts, in particular Verdana, are easier for older eyes to read on screen.
  3. For navigation, make the fonts even larger and in a bold context. Subtlety and artistry are not the order of the day here.
  4. Increase the line spacing. I typically use a CSS line-height of 1.6 (which means 1.6em or 160%).
  5. Keep Flash and other animation to a minimum.
  6. Make it easy to donate money. Don’t discreetly bury donation and pledge forms.
  7. Have content that’s of interest to older people. Our seniors particularly like the sermons we keep on our site. And when we have a senior’s brunch, it’s easy to take photos and make a web album. The more ambitious could do things such as video interviews of the oldest members and stream them, which would also have great historical potential. Or just ask seniors what they would like on the web and then do it. Really, it’s that simple.

For more information and references (though ironically, I find it a bit hard to read), see the March, 2007, UI Design Newsletter.