Church Website Help

Site Review: Faith UMC – Saint Charles, MO

July 6, 2007 – 4:02 pm

Church: Faith UMC – Saint Charles, MO
URL: http://www.faithumcstcharles.com/

Faith UMC

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 the other links all seem relevant.

I have a concern about the map link. It goes straight to MapQuest. Rather than doing that, you should have it land on a page on your site, include some text about where you are, an overhead shot of your area, and then a link to MapQuest. Also, why the copright notice next to the MapQuest link? You don’t need to do that and it’s just adding clutter to the page.

Browsing around

My first stop was in this weeks calendar of events. You’re going to hate me, but you need to link up a lot of those items. Telling me that there is a men’s breakfast at 6:45 on Sunday might get me interested, but I’m not going to go. Is it at the church? At Hardee’s? Is it for 20something men? Or men in their 60’s? Or both? A brief page with more info would be great.

A big reason I suggest this is because you never know where people might land on your site. If you’re ranked well in Google, people might stumble upon an inner page and never see the front. In fact, you need to assume that it happens sometimes. If they stumble on this page, they’re done. There isn’t a link to anything on it.

Links on a page like this can also help you rank better in Google. For example, if you create a “quilting” page and link your quilting events to it, Google will slowly rank you better for that term. Over time, you’ll probably rank pretty well for “quilting in Saint Charles” and queries like that. While it won’t get you much traffic, it can add up if you do it for all of your activities.

The staff page is good, but what’s up with the background? It looks really neat, but makes the page very hard to read. It needs to go. Same with that annoying flashing “whats new at faith?” text at the top. Make the font bigger if you want, but don’t make it flash.

Next I went to the worship & music page. “Looking for a few good men”. Ok, I’m a man – whatcha got? “After hearing how great the congregaion (sic) sounds on the hymn sings, we know there are some talented singers amount us.”. Ok, great. Good to know. Are you looking for more? You sort of imply it, but you don’t really ask for people. Even if I wanted to, you gave me no direction. Who should I contact?

After that I thought I’d look for info about activities for my children. It must be on here somewhere…

Ahh, there it is. Way at the bottom of the home page, below the “other information”, “archive pictures” and “virtual bookstore”. Why so buried? Did I miss a link somewhere else?

I was disappointed that the “youth only pages” would require a user id and password, but I got right in without one. Either it needs the security fixed, or the note saying it requires a password needs to go.

The problem with the “Activities / Services for Youth” is that I don’t know where to go first. A bit of text on this page explaining things would help. For instance, where do I take my child on Sunday morning? I have no idea…

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization is more inportant for this site than most, because of the name of your city. My standard query when looking for a new church is “city name church”. In your case, I searched for “saint charles church“. You come up 89th. The problem is that there are a lot of churches named “Saint Charles blah blah of city, state”. You’ll need to work hard to rank well at all. Let’s see what we can do.

Your HTML code is pretty good, but there are a few things we can do to clean it up. As a general rule, the less code the better. I would:

Get rid of the meta “revisit-after”. No search engine listens to it.
Try to get rid of some tables. You have tables inside of tables inside of tables. Going to a pure CSS layout would be ideal, but at least try to get rid of some of the nested tables.

Your page titles need some work. My standard suggested title should work well for you, as I think it’s very important that you city be in there.

You don’t seem to use H1 tags anywhere on your site. You need to add some. All they need to be is a few words about each page at the very top. For example, your “traditional service” page could simply have “Traditional Worship Service” in the tag. You can style it however you like using CSS.

Add more internal links wherever possible. While I used the example of “saint charles church”, you’ll want to rank well for thousands of possible searches. For example, the church I was at last year received a total of about 45,000 visitors from Google. Those visitors used over 15,000 different search phrases to find us. We simply linked everything very well so that Google knew what each page of our site was about. That was we could rank appropriately well for everything we offer, usually tied to our city. If someone is searching for soccer camps for their child, would you rather they find your church or the YMCA?

I don’t suggest this next part to all churches because it’s a bit tricky, but I think you need every advantage you can get. Right now, both www.faithumcstcharles.com and faithumcstcharles.com (no “www”) pull up your site. In Google’s eyes, those are two separate pages. Therefore, each one is only half as valuable as it should be. You can set your server up so that if people try to pull up the non-www version of their page it will quietly move them to the www version. This page has more info about that. If you have problems doing it, please post in the comments below and I’ll try to help.

note: try typing in any large site’s URL without the www (CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, Google, etc) and you’ll see what I mean.

Conclusion

You’ve got a lot of great information on the site and it’s really just some minor changes needed. The summary of my suggestions: