Archive for July, 2007
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
Yahoo has just posted a list of 13 ways to improve the speed of your website. Some of them are ones we've discussed on here in the past (ake JavaScript and CSS External being a big one).
Some of the tips really only apply to very large sites, but the list ...
Posted in Site Content | No Comments »
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
Here is a neat article I just found titled "What Harry Potter Can Teach Us About Good Web Design".
The idea is that the Harry Potter books themselves aren't anything special. Nice artwork, but a rectangular shape, standard binding, normal English alphabet, white numbered pages, black text, etc.
What makes them special ...
Posted in Site Content | No Comments »
Monday, July 23rd, 2007
Church: First UMC - Swainsboro, GA
URL: http://www.swainsborofumc.org
Initial thoughts
As you might expect, my eyes were immediately drawn to the animated colored text at the top of the page. It seems like a bad move, for three reasons:
1 - If you're gonna use Flash, at least get some photos of ...
Posted in Site Reviews | 3 Comments »
Saturday, July 14th, 2007
The phrase "the long tail" is becoming more and more popular. I'm going to explain what it is and why you should care.
The long tail refers to all of those keyword phrases that just get a few searches per day. For example, the phrase "church" probably gets thousands ...
Posted in Other Tips | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
In the past, I've been pushed to add many things to church sites that might be nice, but rather unnecessary. Some I was able to easily convince people that we didn't need ($5000 for "virtual tour"), others were harder to battle ("why isn't the whole site FLASH?").
Then today I found ...
Posted in Other Tips | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
Church: First UMC - Mt. Ephraim, NJ
URL: http://www.njfaith.com/
Note: At the webmaster's request, this is a follow-up to a review I did for this website back in January, 2007.
Initial thoughts
Since my previous review, the site has gotten a complete facelift. I thought the old design was pretty good, but this ...
Posted in Site Reviews | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Church: First UMC - Elgin, IL
URL: http://gbgmchurches.gbgm-umc.org/fumcelgin/
Initial thoughts
For some reason, the first thing I noticed on this site was the nice, clean list of links down the left side. That's not a bad thing. However, part of the reason I noticed that was because the images were ...
Posted in Site Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007
Church: Faith UMC - Saint Charles, MO
URL: http://www.faithumcstcharles.com/
Initial thoughts
The first thing I see on the front page is your building. Please don't do that. Other than that, the front page is pretty good. The contact info it easy to find, the worship info is easy find, and ...
Posted in Site Reviews | No Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007
I find myself often talking about the importance of good page titles, so I thought I'd get all of the info into one place.
The page title is very important for a number of reasons:
It was what people see in their toolbar when your site is open.
It is the default text ...
Posted in Site Content | 3 Comments »
Friday, July 6th, 2007
Church: Hillsdale UMC - Hillsdale, NJ
URL: http://www.gbgm-umc.org/hillsdale-umc/
Initial thoughts
Oddly enough, my first thought when viewing this site was "what's up with the text in their header?". It appears that you compressed the header jpg just a bit too much, as the letters are all surrounded by artifacts. I ...
Posted in Site Reviews | No Comments »
