Help for church webmasters everywhere.
Church: LaGrange Park Baptist Church – Fayetteville, NC
URL: http://lagrangeparkbc.org/
I did this video review live on my LiveStream account a little while ago. Kind of fun. I’ll try to give a little more warning before I do a live one next time. Anyhow, check it out below!
Church: Morristown United Methodist Church – Morristown, NJ
URL: http://www.morristownumc.com
Check out the video review below. As always, please share your thoughts in the comments or request your own review via our Twitter account.
Church: Crossroads Christian Church – New Smyrna Beach, FL
URL: http://www.crossroadsnsb.org/
Another video review for you. I kind of like doing these, so send us your requests via Twitter and we’ll try to showcase your church.
Leave your thoughts about this review in the comment section below. Thanks!
Church: New Hope Christian Fellowship – Oahu
URL: http://www.enewhope.org/
I’ve decided to take a different approach with this review and do it via video. Let me know what you think of the technique (do you prefer video or text), as well as the content.
Two quick links for things mentioned in the video: How to fix canonicalization issues and what proper title tags should look like.
If you’d like your site reviewed (free of charge, of course), just send us a message on Twitter (@ChurchWebsite) and we’ll get one posted.
Enjoy!
Sorry so quiet latest. Between a variety of other projects I simply haven’t had time to post here in a while. However, that doesn’t mean I’m gone!
In fact, I’ve been trying to get more proactive on Twitter to assist churches there. If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas, send us a message there.
Thanks!
Mickey
I wrote an article a few days ago for TwiTip, a site full of great Twitter tips. In it, I show how we:
Hopefully you find the article useful. Check it out at TwiTip, or you can see the re-post of it on Anthony Coppedge’s blog here.
What other ways does your church use Twitter?
Our church has been experimenting with Twitter (I’m @mickmel) for the last year or so, but we haven’t made any hard pushes toward using it. Anthony Coppedge has just put out an e-book called The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, and now we might be getting somewhere. Since I got the book, I’ve been talking with various pastors at our church and we’re coming up with some good ideas. I’ll be sharing some of those in a future post.
The e-book is excellent. It’s only $5 and is well worth it. I have no financial interest in you getting the book — I simply think it’s something that every church needs to look at and consider.
Does your church already Twitter? If so, what kind of cool stuff have you been doing with it?
This is a bit off-topic, but explains my sparce posting on here lately. I’ve been working on a new resource for church worship leaders, and it’s just about ready to go — Tabs For Worship.
It’s somewhat similar to the other guitar tab sites out there, but with a few key differences:
Many of you are getting ripped off by your web design (or hosting) companies, and you don’t even know it. A while back on my SEO blog I talked about the benefits of doing some minor PageRank sculpting to your site. Another simple piece you could add to that is the tiny bit of text in the footer of your site that says “Powered by xxxxx” or “Created by xxxxx” or something to that effect. That link is probably on every page of your site and is helping you leak PageRank like a sieve.
The solution is very simple. Edit the code to include the “nofollow” attribute. This will leave the link there for people to see and click, but Google will stop following it and it’ll help you focus your link juice on your other pages. For example, the link probably looks something like this:
<a href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>
Simply add rel=nofollow in there, like this:
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>
That’s it!
Frankly, I get more upset about this the more I think about it. Most design/development/hosting companies promise to give you great Search Engine Optimization and help you rank better, then steal a good chunk of your link juice for their own gain. It’s awful! I have never done that to a client and I never will.
If you’re a company that does this kind of work for churches and you already nofollow your links on their sites, please let me know in the comments below and I’ll give you some praise.
What if you want to take it further and sculpt your PageRank a bit more? First, we need to explain what sculpting is — it’s simply the act of nofollowing certain links on your site to help focus the link juice on pages that are more important. For example, the “privacy statement” on this blog is nofollowed. I don’t care if it ranks well, and I’d rather get more link juice flowing to the posts on the blog.
On the right is a picture of our church website with the images turned off and the “NoDoFollow” FireFox plug-in turned on (click to view it full-size), to better visualize the link structure of the site. The blue links are normal (”followed”) links, and the red links are nofollowed. I’ll explain my reasoning for some of the nofollows:
I’ve known for a while that our church had a variety of Facebook “groups”. I had set up a church-wide group, and there were at least a handful of youth-related groups. I figured maybe 8 or 10 total. Wow, was I wrong.
I’ve spent the last few days searching, and I’ve found 42 groups so far! It’s crazy. About half of them (22) are by/for students, a few Sunday School classes have their own, our music ministry has 7 groups, our Academy has 3, and then there are a few others. Even our MOPS ladies made their own group!
Now granted, a lot of them are tiny and/or dead (”Girls Retreat 07″), but many are quite vibrant. So how does this affect you?
First, find your church groups that are out there already. It’s taken me a while to track all of these down, and I’m sure there’s a few more out there. Run some group searches with variations of your church name (”mount bethel”, “mt bethel”, “mt. bethel”, “mtb”, etc). Once you’ve exhausted that, find church members on Facebook and see what groups they are already in.
Second, think about what other kinds of groups you can offer. A church member built a group for Live it Live (children’s worship program at our church), and our media folks have started posting weekly videos to the group. We also just added a group for our Encounter (contemporary) service, where they’ll be posting photos, videos, sermon notes, etc. Both of those could be of great value to our members, and great outreach to potential visitors.
Once you’ve done that, you can cross-promote between Facebook and your site. Link to Facebook groups from your site (”for more about our upcoming trip to Kenya, join our Facebook group“). Link back to your site (when appropriate) from your Facebook group.
As church webmasters, we need to start letting go of a little control. You used to want everyone to come to your site, and that’s still an admirable goal. However, job #1 is getting information to those that need it, which often doesn’t involve your site. Our blog posts go out to RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, Twitter users, FriendFeed users, etc. Many people get our bulletin via e-mail, which has lots of great info on it. We have a lot of members that subscribe to our Podcasts. Others obviously use Facebook. None of those people may visit our site, but that’s ok. As long as they get the information, they’ll still hopefully visit the church and connect with people there, which is the main goal of church-related digital communications.
How else can you use Facebook to facilitate activites at your church?
