Church Website Help

Site Review: Annandale UMC

Church: Annandale UMC - Annandale, VA
URL: http://www.annandale-umc.org/

A friend of mine moved up to Annandale about three years ago to take a job as their Director of Music Ministries, and it appears he’s still there. I thought I’d check out the site to see how it was doing and was rather surprised to see that it looked exactly the same as it did three years ago. Hopefully they can use some suggestions from this article to make some much needed improvements.

Initial thoughts

The first thing I noticed was the vast amount of text on the home page. While I’m a big believer in text over graphics, I just didn’t have any clue where to start. My eyes drifted down to “PUTTING GOD’S HOUSE IN ORDER”, which at least showed me that the site was still being maintained. I also noticed that this page (and every other page) is completely missing their “title” tag. While I usually have suggestions for churches on how to improve their title, this is the first one I’ve seen in a while that doesn’t have one at all. As a result, it looks funny in my taskbar, a standard bookmark is useless, and they’re no doubt buried in the search engines.

At the bottom of the home page are a bunch of annoucements, which surprisingly pop up as PDF files. Don’t do that! Always label them as PDFs with a little icon or something. Really, it’s best to pull them out of PDF and post them as HTML, but if you must do PDF, please label them as such. I thought this was funny — “You need Acrobat Reader to open the PDF file and can download that free from the Internet“. In other words, if you need it go find it yourself!

Finally, at the very bottom, is a hit counter. How nice. Why is it there? Those were cool in the mid-90s, but look around - no one else displays them. Having a robust analytics tool is quite important for any site, but this is neither robust or important. In this case, it looks rather pitiful. While 50,000 visitors looks nice, it’s not so good when you realize that’s a total since 2001. It comes out to about 25 visits a day. For a church that size, I’d be hiding that number.

I did appreciate the fact that the church address and phone number were very easily found, as well as a nice link to the important info — “Directions”, “Our Sunday Worship Services” and “Contact Us”. Let’s check those out.

Browsing around

The directions page is pretty well done. I had a hard time figuring out where they were in the first map, but I like that they include text directions from a number of different directions.

Next, I went to the “Our Sunday Worship Services” page. It gives the necessary info (including scripture for the next few weeks), but is lacking a few things. For one, where is the Sanctuary? It seems to be a fairly large church, so I’m not sure I’d know where to park. Worse yet, they mention “Hughes Hall” but give no link for more info on that. I suppose it’s at the church, but I don’t know that for sure. If it is, is it attached to the main building? I have no idea.

Then I tried out the “Contact Us” page. Whoops. It’s not a page - just an e-mail link. Don’t surprise me like that. I expected a contact form, or a list of staff members or something like that. Oddly enough, they show the church e-mail address below the menu on the left side, but that’s not linked.

Since my buddy Pat is still doing music up there, I thought I’d go to the “Music Ministries” page. The resulting page is very boring, but useful - I get links to their three main areas (adult, youth, children) as well as links to some recent pictures. I would think a few sentences worth of text and maybe a photo would help, but I appreciate the fact that the page is uncluttered.

Off we go to “Adult Emsembles”. This page lists the three choirs, with information on when they perform and when they rehearse. Not bad. However, each of them says “Director: Pat Vaughn”, with no other info. Why not a link to a page about Pat with a photo, e-mail and phone number. A short bio would be nice too, but I know it can be like pulling teeth to get those from some people. Still, at least give me a link with some info about him.

I just noticed a link called “About This Site” on the left. I don’t see those very often, but a glimpse inside tells me why.

• This page is designed to be viewed on monitors either using 800×600 pixel….
  • No no no no no. Never do that. You need to be really cocky to think that someone is going to change their resolution just to view your site. You might get the occasional person to do it, but not many.
• In order to use the left-side navigation bar you must have the browser window set to “full screen”
  • No I don’t. It’s not, and it works fine. However, if you know there is a problem for people with less than “full screen” set, you need to fix the problem on YOUR end, not mine.
• This site uses frames, but we’ve tried to keep it as user-friendly as possible, blah blah blah.
  • I like the way they worded that. “This site uses frames, BUT we’ve tried to keep it user-friendly”. They know that frames are a bad idea, they just don’t have the desire to change it.
• If you find for some reason that you cannot use the navigation bar, at the bottom of the main page there are links to all of the “parent” pages. To move from “parent” page to “parent” page you will have to use your browser’s “back” button to return to the main page.
  • What? I pretty much know what they’re trying to say, and if you’re reading this site then you probably do too. However, I’d guess at least 50% of their visitors would have no idea what that junk says.
• The AUMC site contains some links to outside Web sites. When these are clicked, a separate browser window will open for them.
  
  • Why? That just breaks their back button. If a user wants it in a new window, let them open it in a new window. If not, don’t.

So that was a fun page. The rest of the site pretty much follows suit. Fairly easy navigation, a LOT of text, and not many internal links within the text. For example, here is part of a paragraph from “About AUMC” –> “Our Congregation”.

To this end, our Bread of life Program is designed to attract and welcome new members and visitors. Our Institute for Christian Growth and Servanthood offers study tours, seminars, and educational opportunities. Mission and service opportunities abound. We participate in Volunteers In Missions (VIM) programs, Appalachia Service Project (ASP) and other mission programs. Disciple Bible is offered as are other Bible study opportunities. Our newly rebuilt Wright Hall enables us to sponsor basketball clinics, exercise programs, and fellowship activities; the newly opened Child Care Center provides day care for 55 children.

No where in there is a link to any more info about any of the programs mentioned. Let’s see that same bit of text, but this time I’ll bold the words that I think should be linked somewhere with more info.

To this end, our Bread of life Program is designed to attract and welcome new members and visitors. Our Institute for Christian Growth and Servanthood offers study tours, seminars, and educational opportunities. Mission and service opportunities abound. We participate in Volunteers In Missions (VIM) programs, Appalachia Service Project (ASP) and other mission programs. Disciple Bible is offered as are other Bible study opportunities. Our newly rebuilt Wright Hall enables us to sponsor basketball clinics, exercise programs, and fellowship activities; the newly opened Child Care Center provides day care for 55 children.

This same idea should be implemented throughout the entire site. Some of those pages already exist and others would need to be built.

Search engine optimization

We’ll start with the good stuff:

• Solid PageRank (4).
• Lots of text-based links (rather than images)
• That’s about it.

So what needs to change?

• First, lose the frames. That will be a huge undertaking, but it needs to be done.
• Once that’s done, start adding title tags to each page. I would suggest my standard “church name - location - page” style. For example, the title tag on the Music Ministries page would be:
  • Annadale United Methodist Church - Annandale, VA - Music Ministries
• Lose the frames
• Get rid of the font tags. I’m pleased that they use H1 tags on most pages, but flavor them with CSS rather than font tags. This will make the pages much lighter.
• Lose the frames.
• Better internal linking. In most cases, if I search for the name of a church staff member in Google, their staff page should come up first. This is due to there being so many links on the site that point back to it. Every time you mention a staff member you should link to their page. Every time you mention a building, link to its page. Every time you mention a ministry, link to its page.
• Lose the frames

Conclusion

I have to hope that they were looking at re-doing the site by this point anyhow, so maybe this info will be of some value. If I were digging in and had to simply repair this site, rather than re-build from scratch, I would:

• Lose the frames. Seriously. I’ve already given a bunch of reasons why they need to go (Title tags, SEO, etc), but here’s another — I can’t link anyone to a specific page on the site! If I saw something cool on the children’s page that I wanted to send to my wife, I’d copy and paste the link and send it. However, every link is simply a link to the homepage because of the frames.
• Work on the rest of my SEO suggestions.
• Consolidate the menu. I don’t have a definite rule on how many items should be in a top-level menu, but I’m sure it’s less than the 27 that are there now. Somewhere around 10 should be the ceiling; 5 might be better. One called “programs” or “ministries” will take care of half of it. Oddly enough, there already is an “Our Ministries” page, but most of the links are duplicated right below it. Working out a good menu structure can take some real planning. Look at how other churches break it down and then try to figure out how your pages would fit into that scheme.
• Add some photos of your church. No, not the building — the people. The front page needs to have a smiling face or two on it. Don’t overdo it, but a little spice would be nice.
  • Yes, of course the new “facility” section certainly can have pictures of the building on it. That’s what the facility is. Just remember that the “church” is nothing but the people inside.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

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