Church Website Help

Site Review: Immanuel UMC - Ripon, WI

Church: Immanuel UMC - Ripon, WI
URL: http://www.riponumc.org/

Initial thoughts

As you might expect, my eyes were first drawn to the animation in the corner. My thought is that you need to get rid of it, but that decision obviously lies with you. My thought is that:

• A - Any Christian that visits the site doesn’t need to hear that message.
• B - Any non-Christian visiting the site won’t listen to that message. They’ll think “here we go again…” and move on.

I certainly could be wrong, but I just don’t think that needs to be the first thing that every visitor sees.

As for the rest of the home page, it’s pretty good. It’s got a nice clean look and not too much text. It could stand to have an image or two thrown in to help break things up, but I’m always a big fan of a simple look.

Having the contact info on the home page is always good. The one thing you really need on that page are more links. Let me click on things like “Traditional Worship Service”, “Praise I singing”, “Rev. Paul Nulton” and things like that for more information.

What’s up with the “Are Your Kitchen Knives Dull?” link at the bottom? At first I thought it was a clever attempt to promote a new Bible Study or something, but it’s just a link to knives on eBay. I hope there’s a good story behind that, or else it reflects very poorly on your site.

Also, I get a JavaScript error when the page loads, both in Firefox and IE. You’ll probably want to check that out.

Browsing around

Next up I tried to go to “About Us“, but it appears that I can’t — I have to go to one of the sub-menus. You really need to build a page for “About Us”, even if it’s little more than links to the sub-pages. People expect to be able to click on it, so let them. So, I went into the “staff” page. It looks good - I like seeing nice large pictures of staff members, so good job. However, I’d suggest that you build a separate page for each one, mostly so you can reference them individually from various places on the site.

Also, is there no contact info for individual staff members? No phone, no e-mail, nothing? It sure looks that way.

Next I went into the “Ministries” page. The first thing I get is a list of the main ministries offered at your chuch, which is good. However, I have to wonder why those don’t show up as drop-downs below the main “Ministries” button.

From that page I wandered into Children’s Ministry to see what you would have for my kids. Hello - new window! What was that for? Never give me a new browser window unless I ask for it — it’s just bad manners.

I’ve said before that I like a good, clean page. That being said, if any page needs some photos, it’s the children’s page. Give me some smiling faces to make me feel good about the program. The rest of the page would be good, but it’s all out of date. I guess some of the stuff from last fall/winter might still apply, but every date I can find on there is behind us.

So let’s try the youth events. This page is much more up to date (a little behind, but certainly acceptable), but it’s lacking links. Suppose I wanted to come to an event. I see that next week they’ll be having dinner at Shannon’s home at 6:30. Shannon who? How do I contact her? Where do I go? Since I already went to the staff page, I assume you’re talking about Shannon Rogers. However, even going back there doesn’t give me any info to help me contact her.

Ideally, the word “Shannon” on this page would be linked to a page just for Shannon Rogers. On that page would be her photo and bio (like you already have), along with phone and/or e-mail.

Next I decided to look at the sermons. I expected MP3s, but got Word Docs instead. Having a text format for the sermon info is great, but using Word is a bad decision because not everyone has Word. If they don’t have it, it’s like $90 to get it. Post those as PDF files instead, because the PDF reader is free.

Finally, I cruised down to the calendar to see what was going on. New window - duck! I’m quite impressed with the number of activites shown, as it shows that you’re a very active church. However, I once again am longing for more links. A 9-10 AM “prayer and share” sounds like it might be good, but I can promise I won’t be there - I have no idea where it is, what it is, or what to expect. Same with the “Survivors of suicide support group”. It might be exactly what I need, but I don’t have any details about it.

Search engine optimization

Ripon doesn’t strike me as a big town, yet you come up 40th in Google when I search for “ripon church“. People new to the area are unlikely to find your church online unless they’ve been told about it by a friend.

Let’s start with your title tags. Your home page title tag is great “Immanuel United Methodist Church - Ripon, WI”. In fact, I wouldn’t change it a bit. However, on the other pages you’ll probably want to tweak it. Use that same format and just put “- page name” at the end. For example, on your “youth events” page, you’d want it to be:

Immanuel United Methodist Church - Ripon, WI - Youth Events

It appears that you use H1 tags on most pages - very good! They’re styled to look fairly small, but that’s fine. Well executed.

Your HTML code could use a lot of clean-up. The main problem is that you have a ton of CSS on every page. That’s fine, but you don’t need to include that style information every time. You can put that all into an external file and then just reference it on each page. That will make every page much, much lighter. You’ve also got a bit of JavaScript that could be tossed into external files as well, though you need to fix it first.

Conclusion

Overall, the site is pretty good. There are a few things that could use some tweaking and a couple things that need to go. To summarize:

• Consider getting rid of the animation on the home page.
• Create individual pages for each staff member.
• Link everything you can internally (places, events, people, etc).
• Move your CSS and JavaScript to external files.
• Clean up your title tags just a bit.
• The “Are You Kitchen Knives Dull” really needs to go. Unless there is some decent explanation for that, in my mind it is completely inappropriate to use the church website for something like that.
• Stop having some of the pages open in new windows.
• Change the sermon Word Docs to PDFs.
• Add a few pictures here and there, especially in the children’s area. Use real faces, not buildings or clip art.

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

Posted in Site Reviews | |