Church Website Help

Site Review: FUMC Dothan

Church: First Untied Methodist Church - Dothan, Alabama
URL: http://www.fumcdothan.org/

I feel I should offer a disclaimer on this site before we start. I worked at this church for a few years (2002-2004) and did their website. It was decent at the time, but nothing too great. I had used TYPO3 to power the site, which had its good and bad points. Anyhow, they’ve finally updated their site and I see a number of things that could be easily tweaked to improve it, so here we go…

Initial thoughts

My first thought wasn’t too bad. I love that there are smiling faces on the front - that’s always good. I don’t care for the color scheme, but I’m not a designer so I probably shouldn’t get into that very much. We’ll focus on content/SEO and let them figure out the best colors.

Some other things are done very well on the front. The Sunday worship schedule is very easy to find. My only complaint about that is that only “The Bridge” is linked to anything. Why isn’t “Communion in the Chapel” or “Sanctuary Services” linked anywhere? I want to know what their Sanctuary Services are like, and a link there would make sense.

I also really like the fact that the address and phone is on every page, but it’s in white text on a yellow background, which makes it nearly impossible to read.

Browsing around

So, let’s hit the “News and Events” to see what’s new. Not much, apparently. This is a large church (around 2500 members, I think), so this page should be packed. Instead I see simply a “church directories coming soon” announcement (no link for more info) and an animated gif with an “under construction” truck. That scared me. I haven’t seen cheesy “under construction” gifs in a while, so at this point I became concerned about the rest of the site.

To the rest of you out there - don’t do that! If you have content, build a page and put it up. If not, don’t.

I tried the “weekly church calendar” on the site, but it was empty. Next I tried the newsletter and got some real content. This is a pretty well done page. The only thing here is that the newsletters are listed and linked, but not clearly identified as PDFs (that info is way at the bottom). At the very least, give me a little icon or something so I know what I’m clicking. I hate to be surprised by a PDF…

Next I went into “ministries & outreach”. All in all, not a bad page. One thing that could be changed was the link at the bottom “for more information”. I love that the info is there, but I hate that it doesn’t link to a page with more info about “Rev. David Hendrix”. Every staff member should have a page devoted to them so that you can just refer people to that page rather than trying to give all of their info every time.

I wanted to check out the youth page since I used to be involved with their youth department, but I couldn’t find it. Later I found it tucked under “christian education”. Huh? Why on earth is it there?

Speaking of strange menu titles, I find all of them to be rather Christianese. I’ll admit that it can be difficult to categorize the areas of a church without Christian lingo, but these aren’t good. I try (though often fail) to avoid using the word “ministries” in a top level menu, and having “christian education” up there just isn’t good.

While we’re up there, I fail to understand why the “Click logo for home” is necessary. Most people know that already. If you’re concerned that they don’t, then just change that text to “home” and have it link home. Very rarely should you instruct users to click elsewhere to get something done. If you need to link them somewhere, then just link them there. Don’t tell them “click over there to get to x” - just be a little redundant and provide two links.

Anyhow, we’re still on the “ministries & outreach” page. I thought I’d check out the “Community Outreach” page. Dead link. Same with a few others on that page. If the pages aren’t ready yet, then don’t build the links. If it was just some typos, then it’s understandable - there are always some bugs on a new site.

At this point, I decided to head back to the home page again. I love churches that have a “first time visitor info” link on the front, so I followed it. The resulting page was pretty good. The text at the beginning starts with “We want to personally welcome you…”, which I always find humerous. You didn’t “personally” welcome me at all. In fact, you won’t even know I visited the site until you look at your site logs later. That aside, it is a friendly touch to have.

The list of services is nice. I just noticed that they no longer have a “facility” section on the site. For large churches (such as this), I always recommend that. Telling a first time visitor that the service is in the “Fellowship Hall” means nothing. Which side of the church is that on? Where should I park?

Below that are directions/parking info, consise and well-done.

I also like the link for nursery info, so I followed it. The nursery page is good, but it highlights some of the shortcomings mentioned above:

• I should contact Sheri Downey. Great. Who is she? Give me a link to a page with photo and e-mail, please.
• Where is the nursery? Tell me what building it’s in, then give me a link for more info about that building.

Search engine optimization

This church is fortunate to be in a small town like Dothan. Even with terrible SEO, they’ll still rank well because of the lack of “competition”. That being said, there is a lot to improve.

Let’s start with the mighty “title” tag. This can be one of the most important parts of a page. The home page tag is “Welcome To First United Methodist Church of Dothan”. ALL of the rest are “First United Methodist Church of Dothan”. A few things to consider:

• Never use the title to talk to people. “Welcome” should saved for the page.
• Every page of your site should have a slightly different title tag.
• The fact that the church name and city were in there already is great.

I suggest a tag like this:

Church name - location - page info

In their case, it would look something like this:

First United Methodist Church - Dothan, AL - Music Ministries

Next we have the common “www” problem. The issue here is that they don’t specify between using www.fumcdothan.org or simply fumcdothan.org (no www). This post will help with that problem.

Next are the H1 tags. Every page should have one. This tells the search engines (and your users) what the page is about. This is often very similar (or identical) to the last section of your title tag for that page. Having the page name buried in an image is fine, but even if you do that you need to have it in an H1 tag at the top of the page.

A few things done well are the internal links and the page URLs. The page URLs are very descriptive and the links on the site are mostly text-based and informative about the destination. That helps quite a bit in the search results.

Conclusion

It’s a good start. I’m going to assume it just went live and the bugs are still being worked out. Here’s what I see as some of the things that need to get some attention:

• Put some text on the home page (at least a little bit) with some info about the church. Love the pics, though!
• Get rid of the “click logo for home” link on most pages.
• Fix the title tags.
• Add H1 tags.
• Fix the “news and events” page as described above.
• Fix the links on the “ministries & outreach” page.
• The home page has a 1″ gap at the top on FireFox, and the logo on the home page is a bit squished on both FireFox and IE.
• Fix the www vs. non-www issue.
• Build individual staff pages. Keep the main staff listing, but have each one link to the specific staff member. Then, have links around the site simply link to that staff member’s detail page rather than putting out all of the info all over the place.
• Build some facility pages to help guests figure out where they need to go.
• Link the worship info items on the front page to details about each service.
• Just noticed that “What Do We Believe?” doesn’t work..

That’s probably enough for now. I should also mention that as far as I know, this church doesn’t have a full-time webmaster. This work is done by directors that have other full-time ministries to attend to, so keeping up with it can be understanably difficult. That being said, the checklist I just provided could probably be knocked out in about a day and would certainly make a big difference.