Church Website Help

Site review: Victory Life Center

Church: Victory Life Center - Pittsburg, Kansas
URL: www.victorylifecenter.org

Initial thoughts

One of the first things my eyes were drawn to was the heart in the upper right corner that said “1 John 3:16-24″ (note - not John, but 1 John). Offhand, I don’t know what that verse is. I expected to be able to click on it for more information about it, but was disappointed.

Scrolling down the front page I found a short list describing what each of the main links at the top are for. Again, though, I couldn’t click for more information. If you’re going to tell me “Staff features photos of key church personnel”, why can’t I click on it there?

Browsing around

So, I went back up the top of the page and clicked the staff link. I love the fact that each staff member has their own page, but I found it very odd that you didn’t list their names on that page - only their titles. I would think having their name and title on that page would make a lot more sense.

Going into a staff member’s page gave me more info, but the spacing seems a bit odd. I think that you vertically centered the text in that column on the left, rather than pushing it to the top. You can set “valign=top” for that cell and it will keep that info at the top of the column, which I think would look a lot better.

Moving on, I went to see what “Events” you had coming up. It’s a nice looking page with the little icons next to each item, but no dates? I was very surprised that you didn’t list the dates by each item on that page. Also, I expected the main text (”Guest Speaker”, “Special Valentines Service”, etc) to be clickable, but it seems that only the icon is.

The “Ministries” page had the same linking issue as the events page - the bold text on each item should be clickable.

The “Location” page isn’t bad, but has your tagline at the top twice, which certainly appears to be an error.

The “Sermons” page is nice and simple, and I like the detailed instructions on how to subscribe to the Podcast. However, two things need attention. First, the link to the MP3 for the January 14th sermon doesn’t work - 404 error. The file it’s trying to pull up is “011407.mp3.mp3″. I’m guessing if you removed one of those .mp3s from the filename it would work. Also, you mention that a PDF viewer is needed to view the sermon notes. What sermon notes? I looked back through 2006 and couldn’t find any, anywhere. Also, a link to Adobe’s site to download Acrobat Reader would be nice.

Search engine optimization

There is a lot that could be done to get your site ranked better in Google. Let’s start with your title tags. Right now, they ALL say “Victory life center”. I would suggest changing them to something like “Victory Life Center - Pittsburg, Kansas - Page name”, and have the “page name” change on each page - to the name of the ministry, or the staff member, or the event, or whatever.

The majority of the links on your site are images. Fortunately, you already use the “alt” attribute on all of them, so that’s a big plus. However, as I mentioned above, I would also link the text of items as much as possible and not just the images.

One thing that Google looks at to determine the content of a page is what text is found in the “H1″ tag. On every page of your site, it’s “Jesus is Lord Over Crawford County, Kansas”. That’s simply not needed. While it’s a perfectly fine tag line, putting it on the first page should be enough. On the rest of the site, use the H1 tag more effectively - “events”, “location”, “Pastors Don and Esther Talent”, etc.

Conclusion

It’s very obvious that this is an active church, and that’s a very good thing. I think the biggest thing you need is more internal linking to help people out. Specifically:

• All of the links I’ve mentioned above (”1 John 3:16-24″, events page, ministries page, front page “overview” list, etc)
• Right on the front page it says “if you have any questions please e-mail us…”.
• The logo in the top left corner. Yes, I know you have a “home” link right below it, but many people are used to just clicking the logo to go back home.
• The “Boot Camp” page mentions Pastor Pajo. Link over to Pastor Pajo’s page.

There are a number of weird grammatical/spelling errors. Some examples:

• Valentines Evening - you mention “potatoe”. Only Dan Quayle spells it that way.
• Just above the “overview of our site” on the home page you’ve got some strange capitalization — “… questions Please E-mail us…”. Why are “Please” and “E-mail” capitalized?

You show a lot of different faces in that space in the top right corner. Well done. However, a picture of your building somewhere would be nice. A lot of churches have their site focus on their building, and that’s not a good thing - you’ve avoided that well. However, it would be nice to know what the building looks like if I’m trying to find it for the first time one Sunday.

Feel free to leave your comments if you agree/disagree with anything in this review.