Church Website Help

Site Review: Mt. Healthy UMC

Church: Mt. Healthy UMC - Cincinnati, OH
URL: http://www.mthealthyumc.org/

Initial thoughts

I don’t tend to comment on graphics much, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the background. When I looked at the page, that’s the first thing that my eyes were drawn to — and that’s not a good thing to have happen.

Once I got past that, I found myself very pleased with the content available. Location, contact info and service info are all right there. However, while the Contemporary Service is linked to a page for more info (a whole separate site, in fact), the Traditional Service isn’t. Why not? I have no idea what your service is like, what to wear, etc. I might not even be Methodist, which means I have NO clue what that service might be like. I also like the fact that the location of both services is listed, and those locations are linked to a page with more info.

As I moved down the page, I came to the “Highway 127 Express”. I have no idea what that means, but I guess I don’t need to know. I love that it shows some upcoming events right there, as that shows me that not only is it an active church, but they keep their site up to date. I found it strange that the building locations weren’t linked in here, when they were just a few inches above. It might seem redundant to link them again, but a visitor might not have seen the links above.

Down at the bottom of the home page is some nice contact info. I like that the e-mail link takes me to a form, rather than just a mailto: link. Very nice.

Browsing around

I saw that the site uses a JavaScript menu, so I thought I’d try to break it. I disabled JS on my browser to see what would happen. I was plesantly surprised to see that the root links still appeared (though very hard to read), and each of them brought me to a page where I could get to the content below.

I went into [Updates] –> [News & Coming Events]. This page is formatted very strange, with a big blank gap above the calendar. I don’t see any reason for the “recent updates” to be there, nor the Cross & Flame. They’re nice to have on the front, but they’re just eating up real estate here.

I click on a random event in the list at the top of the page (”Saturday Evening Service”) and was told to “check mthealthumc.org to find out what is happening each week”. Based on that, I assume this data is published somewhere else as well. Still, that’s a pretty dumb message for it to tell me. I’m already on the site - tell me about the service.

I had noticed on the front page there was a link to get directions to the church, so I went there. Um… This page doesn’t help me a bit. It’s just a static image of a Google Map, zoomed in pretty tight on the church. It also tells me “It’s now about half past two” and “This page has been up and running since September 6th, 2001″. I’m on a computer so I already know what time it is, and I don’t really care how long the page has been up. If anything, that’s a bad thing to put there because it tells me that this page has been up for more than five years and still doesn’t work right.

There’s a few things that could greatly improve this page:

1. Put some actual directions on in, in plain text. “If you’re coming east on Route 66, take exit 27g and turn right…”. Do that for people coming from a variety of directions.
2. Make that Google Map a real Google Map. They provide free tools to make that a real map and not just a picture of one. I was clicking all over it trying to do something.
3. Provide images from a series of maps. I’ve seen churches show an image of a map zoomed way out with a red X on their church. Then another one zoomed a bit closer. Then another one a bit closer. Etc, etc.

Ideally, you should do #1 and then either #2 or #3 — no need for both. Given that this page is linked on your home page (which is a great idea), it should provide some better content.

I went to the staff page next. I like that you created separate pages for some of your staff members, but why not for your Pastor? It seems very strange that you have a page dedicated to your custodian, but just a simple e-mail link for your pastor… Again, the “recent updates” and the Cross & Flame could probably go.

Next I went to “Sunday’s Bulletin” under the [Updates] menu. This page is done well. You clearly label each link as a PDF, then provide a link to download Acrobat Reader. The one thing I would change is where it says “this week’s…” to the date. So many churches leave things out of date, I’m not sure what “this week” necessarily means.

Search engine optimization

There are a number of things that can be done to improve the SEO on this site.

First, straighten out the domain name. Everything should land on your main URL, not on 50webs.com. You can buy web hosting for about $5/month, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.

I looked at your source code and was fairly pleased. You’ve done a nice job of moving the CSS and JavaScript to external files, which can help quite a bit.

It appears that you don’t use any H1 tags on the site. This is critical. The main focus of each page should be in an H1 tag near the top of the page. You can style the tag using CSS any way you want, but Google is still going to look for the tag.

Your title tags are decent. I’ve certainly seen much worse, but they could be improved a bit. First, make them consistent. Going through your “groups” we have:

• Adult programs at Mt. Healthy UMC
• Mt. Healthy UMC Youth!
• Children’s Programs at Mt. Healthy UMC
• Mt. Healthy UMC for Women
• Men at Mt. Healthy UMC

Again, none of those are too bad, but they could all be better. I would suggest my normal “Church name - ministry name - location”. In your case, it would be “Mt. Healthy UMC - Childrens Programs - Mt. Healthy, OH”.

Your internal linking could be improved. This would not only benefit the search engines, but would help your users quite a bit. A good example is the music page. At the bottom you mention Cheryl Raine. In the staff section she has her own page. Her name at the bottom of the music page should link to her staff page.

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

All in all it’s a very good site. The most important things are that people will see that you are an active church, and people can get to the information they need with relatively few clicks.

That being said, here is a summary of the things you should look at changing in the near future:

• Build a page for your traditional service and link to it whenever you mention that service.
• Build a page for your pastor and link to it when you mention his name.
• Improve the directions page.
• Resolve your domain name.
• Tweak your title tags
• Add H1 tags to each page.
• Remove the “recent updates”, Cross & Flame and “this page has been up and running…” from every page that has them. (You can leave the Cross & Flame on the home page, of course)
• The other minor things I’ve mentioned above.

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

Posted in Site Reviews | |