Church Website Help

Salted Websites

You may have noticed the new ad on the top right side of the site for Salted Websites.  They’re a Christian web design firm looking to expand their business.

I told them that before I could run their ad, I had to see some of the work they’ve done.  One example they provided me with was for Grace Fellowship Church in Williamsburg, VA.  After looking over the site, I feel good recommending Salted Websites to you.

If you look through the GFC website and think about how it might be reviewed on here, you’ll realize that they do a pretty solid job.  The navigation is built in plain text, they use good page titles, and it has a nice, clean look.  I can’t really review the content of the site, since that is handled by the church and not by SW.

My only real complaint with the site is having the address/phone buried in an image.  It hurts your SEO (just a tiny bit, though) and makes it so I can’t copy/paste the info.  What if I want to drop the address into Google Maps and get directions?  I have to re-type it.  All things considered, though, that’s a very small issue compared to most church sites.

You can visit SW’s examples page to see a few more sites that they’ve built.  If you’re looking to get your church website redesigned, you should check them out.  Their prices are very reasonable and they seem to do a very good job.

If you have any questions, please view their FAQ or just fill out their contact form.

Posted in Companies | No Comments »

More fun ways to use the Google Earth plugin

I just showed you how you could add a simple location via the Google Earth plugin to your site, but how about a series of locations?

Using EarthSwoop, I thought it’d be neat to show all of the places that we’re sending mission teams this summer.  You could do the same thing for local missions, youth group trips, or anything else outside of your church.

So, I put in all of our mission trip locations, then embedded it into the blog on our site.  Here it is:

Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

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Another way to show a neat map on your website

A while back I showed you YourMap, an easy way to embed a Google Map on your site.  Google now makes it very easy to do that using their normal Maps site, but here’s a new tool — ShareIt.

Google has recently released the “Google Earth Plugin”.  It’s a free plug-in that runs Google Earth (3D buildings and everything) right in your browser!  It’s quite slick.

The problem is that it’s kind of a pain to use it on your site.  The Digital Earth Blog just did a round-up of the best ways to use it to embed a map in your site, but I think the clear winner for churches is ShareIt.  It makes it very simple to add a map to your site — probably less than 30 seconds to get the code you need.  Here is what it looks like on your site:

Powered by Google Earth Hacks | Map Details | Create your own!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Posted in Site Content | 3 Comments »

Twitter, FriendFeed and your church website

By now, you’ve probably heard all about Twitter, the very popular micro-blogging service.  If not, here is a short video explaining it:

At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively.  We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:

• http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc — This is essentially just a feed from our blog, using the WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools.  We plan to expand it to cover more topics, but it’s just a blog feed for now.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelmusic — Our Senior High Choir Tour is currently in progress, and they’re using Twitter to keep the congregation (especially their parents!) informed about the trip.  We’ve done this with other trips, with decent success.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec — We have a very active recreation ministry, and this is updated if conditions on our field are bad, so parents know whether games have been canceled or not.  It’s very useful for the parent on the go to get a text message with the info, rather than having to pull up the website or call the church office.  We also push this Twitter feed to our main website and our mobile website, using a free script called Twitter2HTML.

Other churches are starting to get on board.  Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed.  There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.

The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level.  If you just want updates, click the link and read them.  Want an RSS feed?  Subscribe.  Have your own Twitter account?  Follow ours.  Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.

All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation.  Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts.  How to keep up?  Enter FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds.  We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page.  I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources.  We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.

How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet?  Or any other similar services?

Posted in Site Content | No Comments »

People might want to print your directions page

I need to go to Dunwoody UMC tomorrow for a seminar, so I went to their site to pull up directions.  My GPS is dead, so I’m having to do it the “old-fashioned” way by looking up directions on-line.

When they changed to their new design a few years ago, I told them it might be a problem to have everything in Flash like that.  The site looks great and is easy to navigate, but the all-Flash approach is a killer.

For starters, Google can’t read much of it, including the primary navigation.  They’re a pretty large church (over 4000 members), yet Google only has 266 pages in their index.  That is bound to create a lot of missed opportunities.  It doesn’t matter how great your site is if people can’t find it.

Back to my problem — directions.  I found their directions page easily enough and the content on it is pretty good.  The address is always at the top of the page, and this page has both a map and text directions on it.  The problem is that it’s ALL buried in Flash!

I can hover over the map image to view it larger, but I can’t click on it to get a large jpg to print.  Since the text is all in Flash, it won’t print nicely either.  To the right is what their directions look like in the “print preview”.  Helpful, huh?

Also, this text being in Flash once again kills potential Google traffic.  For example, their directions page mentions that they’re near Perimeter Mall.  I doubt many churches can say that, but someone may search for it.  If we search for “church near perimeter mall“, they don’t even show up in the top 100!

This leads to three points:

• If your church is near a major landmark, be sure to mention it on your site, both for the sake of your visitors and for Google.
• If you put information like that on the site, make sure Google can see it.
• Make sure I can print your directions page!

As for me, I just went to Google Maps and printed directions from there instead.  I really just need to get a new GPS.

Posted in Search Engines, Site Content | No Comments »

When people are new to an area, what do they want from your site?

I got an e-mail today that really got me thinking.  It read, in part:

What are the main things new folks in town are looking for in a church website?  Is it information on specific ministries?  If so, which inistries does that tend to be?  Children and families? Is it service times and directions?

What are the MAIN few things?

It’s a remarkably difficult thing to answer.  Different people are looking for different things.  By looking into the long tail keywords that find your site you can get some idea, but it’s still very broad.

However, his e-mail said specifically “new folks in town”, which helps narrow it down quite a bit.  Based on that, we’ll assume a few things.  These wouldn’t be true in every case, but probably in most:

• They don’t know the area very well.
• They’re already Christians and they’re simply looking for a new church.
• There’s a good chance they already know what denomination they prefer and they’ll stick to it, though that’s becoming less important to a lot of people.

Based on those items, what’s important?  I would have to say, in random order:

• Directions/location.  Saying you’re on the “corner of 9th & Main” won’t help, since they don’t know where 9th or Main is.  Give them a good map, your full address, along with text based directions from each direction into town.  A photo of your building on the directions page can help put them more at ease too.
• Your service times/locations/types.  Do you have a contemporary service?  What’s it like?  What time is each service? What building is each service located in?
• Information for their kids.  Sunday school and nursery being the main two.  Where is the nursery?  What ages can go there?  Where is Sunday School for each grade?  Is there a program for their middle-schooler, or should they come to the service?
• Membership information.  I don’t like to push this information on new visitors too much, especially if they’ve never joined a church before, but this fictional family is probably looking to put down roots.  At the very least, provide some information on what your membership process looks like.

What else?  What other items do you think should be on the list?

Posted in Site Content | 2 Comments »

Don’t Be Inaccessible

Heal Your Church Website has a nice article today about churches that have problems with being inaccessible.

Some of the specifics that Dean mentions:

• Bad Markup
• Browser-Specific Navigation — Things that only work in certain browsers
• Charging Money for Sermons
• Poor Navigation Hierarchy
• Too Much Flash

He gets into more detail about why each item can cause problems.  It’s a good read - check it out.

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What message are you sending to your visitors?

Liberty Hill Church in Canton, GA is an awesome church.  I’ve visited for worship a few times, and they are top notch — great preaching and excellent music.  If you happen to live in the area, I highly recommend you check them out.  However, they’ve done something with their website that I think is a bit mis-guided.

They’ll probably change it soon, so I’ve put a screenshot on the right. The have put some text on the top of their site in huge letters.  It reads:

WARNING! If you have received on overnight UPS package showing the shipper as iberty Hill Church your package contains counterfeit checks.  Liberty Hill DID NOT send these packages!

It takes up most of the space above the fold on the home page.  I can appreciate that this appears to be a major problem and they need to alert their congregation.  However, there are better ways to do this:

• E-mail everyone.  I’m sure they have e-mail addresses for most of the congregation.
• Call those that you couldn’t e-mail.
• Put it on the site in an obvious, but less-intrusive location.
• Announce it on Sunday mornings.

Text like this, especially in this location and size, is likely to scare off any first-time visitors to the site.  It’s a not brand-new situation, either.  The Google cache from a week ago shows it there, and it may have been up before then.  You have just a few seconds to tell a new user your primary message, and this is what you want to say?

A few other small notes:

• Part of the text is underlined, but isn’t linked.  I fully expected to be able to click on it.  Never underline text unless it’s a link.
• The “under construction” graphic is cute, but should never be used.  I realize there’s a new site coming, but you still have a content-rich site here.  Make it as good as you can until the new one is ready, then switch over.  A small “Get ready for the new site!” graphic would be fine, but the big “under construction” isn’t necessary.

The result of the “ZOMG!!!!!!!1111″ warning and the huge “under construction” pic means that the main content is way down on the front page — about 1100 pixels by my count.  That’s nearly two screens for a lot of users.

Liberty Hill Church is everything they claim at the bottom — God-seeking, Jesus-focused, Bible Based, etc.  They just need to make sure and tell people that message.

Posted in Other Tips | No Comments »

Site Review: Thalia UMC - Virginia Beach, VA

Church: Thalia UMC - Virginia Beach, Virgina
URL: http://www.thaliaumc.org/

This site has a lot going for it. Ironically, the one thing I don’t like about the first page is the title tag, which happened to be the only thing I did like about the last site. The title tag never changes throughout the entire site, which is a major no-no. Read our post on good page titles to get that fixed up. Your city makes this easier to do, as you don’t need to worry about or not to abbreviate your state name.  Abbreviate it, and you’ll still pick up the keywords for “Virginia” because of the city, and then “VA” for the state.

The menu system at the top is both good and bad. It’s good because it’s done with CSS, so that it is accessible to all users and to Google. The bad is that none of the main menu items are clickable. If I want to learn “About Thalia”, why can’t I click that? At the very least, have it land on a page that essentially just gives the sub-menu options again.

The content on the front page is superb. You give the worship info, contact info, directions link, church overview, and recent announcements all in one place. There are a few small tweaks I would suggest:

• Give us pictures of the church, not the building.
• Embed more links into the text. You did a great job of the in the announcements section, but the welcome message and sidebar info could use more links. What is “Holy Communion”? “Euchasrist”? “Sunday School”? Make them all clickable.

Being a visitor, I thought I’d check out the directions page next. Very well done. Large address, nice embedded map, and a link to get personalized directions at the bottom.

I went back up to the menu to decide where to go next. Personally, I don’t like the cute/vague menu options that you have (Learn, Teach, Live), but I know that others like that kind of thing. If I want info about the youth program, where would it be? I have no clue which one it’d be under.

I found the youth page under “Teach with Christ”. It’s a short page, but pretty good. I’d suggest adding years to your dates, simply because some sites are so outdated. You’re talking about events in July, but other sites are still talking about events from last July. Putting a year makes it very clear that you’re on the ball.

Why isn’t there a picture of Pastor Art on the Pastor Art page?

I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more about your worship services, but it doesn’t appear you have anything other than times. Are these traditional? Contemporary? What should I wear? Add a page with more worship info, then link it from the worship listings on the home page.

Your HTML is well-written. I didn’t validate it, but you do a few things very well — H1 tags are on each page, JavaScript is called from external sources, things like that.

Your “History” page shows a picture with the title “Now - 2006″. It should either say “Now” or “2006″, but not both since it’s not true.

All in all, you have done an excellent job with this site.  The suggestions I have (mostly taken from the text above):

• Fix the title tags
• Add a page for the worship services
• Add a few more embedded links on the front page
• Put a photo of some people on the front page
• Build a section with more information/photos about your building.

Other thoughts or comments?

Posted in CWH News | No Comments »

Site Review: FUMC - Clarion, PA

Church: First UMC - Clarion, PA
URL: http://www.fumc-clarion.org/

Let’s start with the good news — this site has a well-done page title. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to work.

First off, I hate frames. There were some decent reasons for having them 10 years ago, but no excuse any more. You can’t bookmark an individual page, you can’t change titles on each page, external sites can’t link to a particular page, Google doesn’t index them well, they don’t work well on mobile browsers, etc. Step one is to get rid of those. You can keep your menu on the side of every page using a different method, such as SSI or PHP.

Next, why the graphical-based navigation? I let Crestline get away with it because they used some nice graphics, but in this case it needs to go. Change those to plain text, then style the background to look like buttons.

I don’t understand the header on the top of the site. Why are you telling me the URL again? I’m already on the page! Also, there’s no reason to use a verizon e-mail address, especially if it’s that prominent on the page. Your registrar and/or web host can set-up a simple forward, so that e-mail from “info@fumc-clarion.org” forwards over to your verizon account, allowing you to promote a much better looking e-mail address.

The Building Committee Master Plan is ok, but it breaks two major rules — don’t surprise me with a PDF and don’t say “click here”. If you have a PDF, make it very clear before the user clicks. Here is a good example (scroll down).

You did a good job with a prominent link to your worship information, which leads to a page with good info on it. I still have a few questions (”what do I wear?” being one), but you cover things pretty well.

Being new to your site, I clicked the “Visitors” link. The resulting page isn’t bad. You provide an address, phone and e-mail, which is always good.

Next, I decided to explore some ministries. Do you not have any youth? Or children? I see the daycare, but nothing about Sunday School for kids, VBS, etc.

Ahh, there it is — “church school”. I had no idea. Once I get there, it’s a pretty good page. I like the links to the floorplans, so I have some idea where I’m going.

Some church sites focus too much on their building, and you don’t have a problem with that. However, having never been to the church before, I’d love to see a picture of the outside somewhere — maybe on the “Find us” page. If I was coming to visit for the first time, I’d like to have some idea of what I’m looking for.

You could stand to mix a few more links into the text on the site. For example, on the “Disciple Bible Study” page (I can’t link to it because of the frames…), you say to “contact the church office” at the bottom. Why not link that to the “Talk to us” page?

Small thing — the copyright link at the bottom still says 2007 on some of the pages.

The graphic in the top left corner is annoying and, frankly, pretty cheesy. Looking at it honestly — do you think a non-believer will stumble on your site, see that graphic, then decide that they indeed need God? If so, then I suppose you can leave it, but I have to believe the answer is “no”.

You might want to remove the guestbook from the front page. It hasn’t had a new post in nearly three years, thus reflecting very poorly on the site.

I rarely say this — in fact, I don’t think I’ve suggested it on this blog yet — but this site probably just needs to be re-built from scratch. Most of the time, sites can be slowly improved and tweaked to become better and better. However, having to lose the frames and rebuild the navigation means that you may as well start fresh. You can certainly copy-and-paste a lot of your existing text onto the new site.

In most cases, you potentially would lose a lot of Google traffic if you did that. However, your frames and navigation style probably keep your Google traffic to a bare minimum anyhow, so I doubt there is much risk involved.

I’m sorry to be so harsh. I feel like the church is probably a wonderful community of folks, and I simply think that your site should better reflect that.

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | 1 Comment »