Site Review: St. Matthew’s UMC

July 5, 2007 – 9:13 pm

Church: St. Matthew’s UMC - Fayetteville, NC
URL: http://www.stmattnc.org/

St. Matthews UMC

Initial thoughts

I like to avoid saying too much about the design of a site, simply because that’s not my strong suit. However, a few things from a design perspective jumped out at me as being very “90’s”. Specifically, the textured background, the wide border on the tables and the visitor counter at the bottom. Those might need to be changed.

For now the third site in a row, we are greeted by a photo of a building. In this case it’s kind of a neat, artsy shot, but it’s still just a building. Show me faces!

I’m also a bit taken aback by the vast amount of content on the home page. That’s not a good thing. Make your initial impact and then provide nice navigation to the other parts of the site - don’t try to cram it all on one page. Let’s go through it a piece at a time:

Address/phone/e-mail at the top - great!
The links for more info. Short, easty to read links - very good.
The Church Newsletter. Here’s where we start to have problems. There is absolutely no reason to have this many newsletters on the front page. You could make a case for having the most current one up there, but that’s it. The rest need to go in their own area.
Who Are We? Keep it
Other Methodist Links - Put them on their own page
Church Directors - Put them on their own page
Web Site for Kids - Put them on their own page
UMNS - Put it on its own page
Online Bible Search Utilities -Put it on its own page
Daily Blessings and The Upper Room - Move them to their own page
Health and Welfar of the UMC - Move it to its own page
Visitor counter - Get rid of it
The contact info at the bottom - not bad. I’m not sure you need the “last updated”, but the rest of it is fine.
The weather info at the botoom - Get rid of it

Browsing around

So lets browse around a bit. I figure I’ll start with the “visitors welcome information“. The first thing I notice is there is no navigation from here. In fact, the only link on the whole page is a link back to the home page at the very bottom. A page like this should have links sprinkled all throughout it. If you mention “worship” or “nursery” or “UMYF” or any of that, it should be linked to a page with more info about that program. A photo or two might help spice the page up. Also, the page stretches to fill the width of the screen, which makes it really wide on my monitor. Long lines of text are difficult to read. You might want to wrap the whole page in a table or a div and limit it to 600-700 pixels wide.

Next up we’ll look at the directions. This is a very well done page. I love all of the links to show people exactly where to enter the building. That kind of things give visitors one less thing to worry about the first time they come to the church. All of the links mixed in this page are exactly the kind of thing you need back on the “visitors welcome information” page.

Going from that page to the Worship Schedule was kind of a let-down. There’s hardly anything there! If nothing else, drop a picture of a service in progress on the page so visitors can get a feel for what it’s like.

The staff page is very nice. I like that you gave each staff member their own page, along with a photo and short bio. Well done.

Search engine optimization

If I was new to Fayetteville and looking for a church home, the first thing I would do is go to Google and search for “fayetteville church“. As of right now, you are the 60th result that comes up for that. Anyone new to Fayetteville will look at 59 other church websites before they’ll even glance at yours. In other words, they won’t find you.

Fortuantely, there are things you can do to help that. The first thing would be to create more pages. Start by splitting the home page up based on some of the ideas I gave you near the beginning on the review. Then start working on other areas that are missing, such as the nursery.

Your title tags aren’t horrible, but they could use some work. Simply changing these will probably have you up 10-20 places in that Google search. Right now, I see tags like this:

St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church
Welcome to St. Matthew’s UMC
Worship Schedule
St. Matthew’s History

These tags are very, very important to ranking well in the search engines. They’re also the default text when someone bookmarks a page. I would recommend my usual “church name - location - page”. In your case, the title of your “history” page would be something like:

St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church - Fayetteville, NC - History

Follow the same idea for all of your other pages.

It doesn’t seem that you use any H1 tags on your site (though you use some H2s). These are very important as well. Whatever the main text of your page is up at the top (like “Weekly Sunday Schedule”), it should be enclosed in H1 tags. You can use CSS to make the text look any way that you want, but Google is looking for those specific tags.

The HTML code on your pages isn’t too bad. I would lose some of the meta keywords (search engines ignore them) as they’re just wasting space. Otherwise, things look good there.

Conclusion

The site could use a few graphic tweaks to make it seem a bit more current. I see a church website that looks stuck in the past, and I associate that with a church that is stuck in the past. You don’t want that.

To summarize, here is what you should look at doing:

Break a lot of the content out of the home page and build separate pages with it.
Get rid of unncessary items like the visitor counter and the weather box at the bottom.
Link internally as much as possible, especially on pages like the “Visitors Welcome Information”
Clean up your title tags
Start using H1 tags

That’s really about it. It doesn’t sound like much, but reworking that front page will be quite a job. Have fun!