Church Website Help

Site review: Stonebriar Community Church

Church: Stonebriar Community Church - Frisco, Texas
URL: http://www.stonebriar.org

The first glance at this site is very impressive. Nice colors, good use of whitespace, and some slick rollovers.

I checked out the site in Firefox 2, IE 7 and Opera 8.5. It looked great in FF and Opera, but something was messed up in IE (shocking, I know). The header at the top (with the logo and the site map, newletters, etc links) was slid WAY over to the right and I had to scroll to see it. Very odd.

Also, I couldn’t get the “text size” buttons at the top to work at all on the home page. On some pages (”beliefs”, for example) they work great. On other pages (like “Women’s Resources”) they work a tiny bit. On the front page, they don’t work at all. Even on the pages where they work it only increases the font by a smidge. I love that they have them there, but they need to work more consistently.

In the large graphic in the center of the page was a link to the “visitor center”. That seemed like a good idea, so I gave it a click. The resulting pages were a great introduction to the church, though they were all buried in Flash. I don’t like being surprised by sound either, so the guy talking caught me by surprise. However, I though it was very well done and offered a GREAT personal touch. Once I was done in there I decided to head back to the main site, but a link wasn’t very evident. Maybe put one in the footer?

I eventually found a link in the “church life” section. I noticed that most of the links on the page used “click here” as their anchor text. This is bad form, both for search engine optimization and (to a lesser degree) user experience. I think that page could be make a bit cleaner by simply doing something like:

***************

Thank you…blah blah..here are a few links to our main website that you might find helpful:

• Women’s Resources
• Men’s Activities
• Children’s Resources
• etc…

***************

From there, I headed out the the Women’s Resources. As with the rest of the site, the look was clean and the navigation was simple. I like the “email to a friend” and “print this page” links as well. One odd thing I noticed was that the Women’s Resources page used an ugly URL (index.php?id=391), but the “print this page” for that page was a nicely formatted URL (print/fellowship/womens-ministries). Changing the the links of the main pages would help a lot in the search engines. Using mod_rewrite (which may be how you create the print pages) would keep things fairly simple.

I would also suggest tweaking the title tags of your pages. They’re already far better than 99% of church sites out there, could be improved a bit. My thought for churches is that the title tag should be something like “church name - church location - page name”. In the case of your Women’s page, it would go from:

Stonebriar.org: Women’s Ministries Home

to

Stonebriar Community Church - Frisco, Texas - Women’s Ministries Home

(I tend to use dashes instead of colons, but not for any good reason — either should be fine)

While I really like the three column look of the interior pages, I think more thought needs to be put into the content of the left-most column. It looks great when there are other pages to link to. However, I’ve found a lot of pages just have that area blank. You could either try to detect that dynamically and put alternate information there when there are no links, or put some extra info below the links that would fill it’s place when there aren’t any there.

There are a few places where I found an older site design, although this may be a known part of the new site changeover. One in particular is the “newsletters” section. Being that it’s linked from the front page, it probably needs to be updated as soon as possible.

Nice job with the staff section. I like to be able to see an overview of the staff and then drill down for more information about each staff member. I’d change their URLs if you can (a sample one - “http://www.stonebriar.org/staff/?no_cache=1&tx_xdsstaff_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=23&cHash=317a827ca4″), and get their name into the title tag on their own pages, but overall it’s well done.

I noticed that you have a dedicated page for Vacation Bible School. We added that as well a while ago, in the hopes to rank higher in Google when people look for VBS in our area. However, your VBS page is quite out of day (inviting me to register for VBS held in mid-June, 2006).

Conclusion

All in all, it’s a very well done site. Overall organization of a site this large can be challenging, but they’ve done a great job of sorting their pages out in a logical way. They keep the search box at the top of every page and a “contact us” link at the bottom of every page, along with the address and phone number for the church.

The site is functional in a nice variety of browsers. More importantly, it remains functional even when Java/JS is disabled. Many sites break once you take that away from them.

There are a quite a few small things that can be changed in order to help the site rank better in the search engines. Making those changes will likely result in a good boost in traffic in the next 3-6 months.

Have other thoughts about this site? Leave them in the comments below.