Church Website Help

Site Review: Hope Works

Church: Hope Works - Fort Worth, Texas
URL: http://www.hopeworks.us/

Initial thoughts

The first thing I did was to put the church name and location at the top of this post. The church name was easy, but it took a minute to find the location — it’s not on the homepage at all! Both from a useability and SEO standpoint, that info should be on every page. At the very least, I’d put the full info in the footer of every page and the city/state at the end of each title tag.

Another thing missing from the home page is worship info. However, it has a nice link that’s easy to spot. Clicking the link gives me some basic info, but it’s a bit perplexing. Here’s a page with the name the building they’re in (Botanic Gardens Indoor Theater) and map, but no address! If I’m not familiar with the town, I’ll need more info than what is provided there. In my case (and for many others, I’m sure), I’d just plug the address into my GPS or else use MapQuest to give me directions.

Browsing around

So I checked out the “Contact Us” page to find the address. This page is done well. I like the info about each pastor, which includes both a photo and bio for each of them. Having both of those pieces in place helps me feel like I know them just a tiny bit before I ever visit the church.

I decided to head back to the home page so I clicked “BACK HOME” at the top. Click. Click. Click. Oops. Not a link. Fortuantely, you’ve got one in the side menu.

I headed out to the forums next, as that’s a feature that most churches don’t do well (or often don’t do at all). In your case, you seem to have some activity on there, which is great. Using phpBB as your software is a fine choice. I’m more of a vBulletin fan, but you saved $160 so I can’t fault you there. The only thing I’d suggest is to get rid of a few forums for now. Despite having 71 posts on there, many of them are empty. The best way is typically to start with a few forums until they’re busting at the seams, then slowly expand out. As you build out the new forums, you can move the relevant posts from the other forums and pre-populate them a bit. Still, though, you’ve done a nice job.

Now, back to the home page. Let’s see. Uh. No link. I’ll just type it in, I guess…

I thought “get to know us” might be neat, but it was just another link to the “contact us” page. Why have both links so close to each other?

I like the idea of a blog on the front. I would suggest maybe a bit of general “welcome” text, but not much. Just something like “we’re a contemporary church in Fort Worth, Texas and we’d love you to come visit. If you have questions, please call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx or e-mail, blah blah”.

I found myself jumping between a handful of themes. I guess maybe three of them - the front page, the other pages and the forum. I can understand the forum being different, but why the drastic change from the front page to the others?

Search engine optimization

You’ve got a few things you can do to help you rank better in the search engines.  Using the simple “Fort Worth church” query, you’re not in the first 100 results.

Titles - Just by nature of using a blog platform, your page titles aren’t too bad, but could be improved.  At the very least, I’d get “Fort Worth”, or “Fort Worth, TX” in there somewhere.

WWW - I noticed that as I browse around the site, it switches back and forth quite a bit between “www.hopeworks.us” and simply “hopeworks.us” (no www).  Those should be more consistent.  In fact, you should choose one and force all traffic from the other to use it.  It can be transparent to the user, but will help quite a bit.  This post has more info on how to do that.

Beyond that, things are pretty good.  WordPress does a nice job.

Conclusion

All in all, you’ve got a pretty solid site.  To summarize, here are the things I would work on:

• Get me back to the home page — fix the link at the top of the red template and add a link somewhere on the top of the forum.
• Make the theme more consistent.  At the very least get the front page and internal pages looking more similar.
• Combine a few of your extra forums, at least temporarily.  That should help your growth.
• Put your full contact info (address, phone, e-mail) in the footer of every page.
• Put more info on the “Location & Services” page.  At least give the address.  Better yet, put in a box for people to generate directions like I did here a while back.

Nice work!