Site Review: Marshallton UMC

July 5, 2007 – 4:02 pm

Church: Marshallton UMC - West Chester, PA
URL: http://www.marshalltonchurch.org/

Marshallton UMC

Initial thoughts

The first thing I see when I open the page is a big picture of the church building. No no no no no. Having your church building in some places on your site is fine, but not as the main picture on your home page. The church is the people, not the building. That should be some bright smiling faces, not an emotionless stone building.

The contact info on the top left is great!

I don’t see any worship info on the front page, but there is a very obvious link to it at the top, so that’s good.

I’m not sure the VBS info needs to be that high on the page, especially with that much text. That info is much higher up than your welcome text.

I don’t intend to be rude here, but does anyone care about the “National/International Church News”? I know the ministers at our church would, but very few members of the congreation would. That looks like something that someone added after they thought “Well, we can do this so I guess we should do this”. If you want that on the site at all, put it away in a sub-page somewhere.

Browsing around

The first place I went was the worship section. I figured I could get there by clicking on the word “Worship”. Nope. Instead, I got a lecture about how I need to hold my mouse over the desired topic, wait a second for the drop-down menu to appear, then click the sub-item. What? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard. This is a great example of “how to get someone to leave your site in 30 seconds or less”. I understand that the content really lives in those sub-menus, and that’s fine. If I click on the main button, it should take me to a page with a list of the sub-items (in this case, “worship schedule” and “music”).

This leads to a bigger problem — what if I don’t have JavaScript enabled? Statistics show that up to 10% of users don’t have JavaScript enabled (usually due to security concerns), so what about those folks? Well, they’ll just go back to Google and try to find another church in the area.

So now I’m on the “Worship” page, and it’s a very nice little page. The text is broken into appropriate-sized paragraphs, bolded when necessary, with a nice photo of the praise band. My only suggestion here would be to link to other pages within that text. For example, you mention the “nursery” in the “education wing”. Link both of those to other pages on your site with more info.

From here I tried to get back to you home page, but it took me a minute to find the link. I expected the logo in the corner to take me there, so you might want to link that up.

Next I went to the “Schedule & Events” page. It’s a decent page, and it shows that the site is kept up-to-date. However, it also needs a bit more internal linking. When you say “Sunday School”, give me a link with more info. Same with “Traditional Service”, “Contemporary Service” and things like that.

Next I thought I’d check out the staff. Again, it makes no sense to me that I can’t click on the main “Our Pastor & Staff” link. In this case, that page should list all of your staff members (maybe with a photo next to each one), with each one linked to their individual page.

I went in to Rev. Widmer’s page to see what it was like. I’m glad there is a photo there of him, and the short bio is nice. However, where is his contact info? E-mail? Phone? Anything?

Search engine optimization

One of the big killers for search engine optimation on this site is the JavaScript-or-die menu. That makes it very hard for search engines to find all of your pages.

Your title tag isn’t bad, but it never changes. It should change to reflect each page. Iwould keep it about the same and just add the page name at the end, like “Marshallton United Methodist Church, West Chester, Pennsylvania - Sunday School”.

You use H1 tags on each page, which is great. However, you should try to improve them. For example, on Rev. Widmer’s page the main tag is “Our Pastor”. You’d be much better of making the tag “Rev. Scott Widmer”.

You need to add much more internal linking. To copy from the previous review I did — “As a general rule, link everything you can. If you mention a building, link to the page with details on that building. If you mention a staff member, link to their page. If you mention a ministry, link to the page with more info about that ministry.”

Conclusion

You’ve got a nice looking site on your hands. It’s clean and easy to read, but it just has a few glaring issues to fix.

First, you need to fix the JavaScript menu issues ASAP. Fortunately, this is easy. The root page for each menu seems to be “default.htm”, “default2.htm”, “default3.htm”, etc. Just modify those pages to show which pages can be found in that menu. That will help the search engines, that will help your users that don’t have JavaScript enabled and that’ll help people like me that assume that they can be clicked.

Some other things to work on: