Church Website Help

Site Review: Whorton Bend UMC - Gadsden, AL

Church: Whorton Bend UMC - Gadsden, AL
URL: http://www.wbumc.com/

Initial thoughts

My first thought was “hey, what a slick looking site”.  Really, it does look very nice.  However, my second thought was “didn’t we use that cheesy animated Cross and Flame on our youth site in 1999?”.  Seriously, I think we did.

Also, I noticed a picture of your church right below the menu.  Please don’t do that.

I assume the God Bless America graphic is just there for the July 4th stuff.

There is an error message under the “Sunday, July 8th” section on the side.  You’ll want to fix that.

What’s up with the handicap symbol near the bottom?  Your church is handicap-accessible?  Or your site is?  Or what?  At least let me click on the graphic so you can explain why it’s there.

The weather info can probably go.  I think most churches add that simply because they can.  “Because I can” is always a horrible reason to add something to your site.

The text on the main page is good — I read about half of it before I got bored and it sounded nice.  You probably need to trim it down, if possible.  Also, that text should be loaded with links.  If you’re telling me how great the youth are, link me to them.  You like to boast of your musical program?  Take me to their page!  That text on the front should easily have 50 links in it.  The worst thing you can do is get me excited about a program and wanting to learn more, and then make me go hunt for the page.  I’m right there reading about it - give me a link!

Browsing around

I thought I’d check out the “Church Staff” page to see what was going on there.  I’ll assume you haven’t really gotten to it yet, as there’s not much of anything there.  At the very least, I would expect photos and contact info for each person.

Ok, how about “Church News“?  This is a great little page - short, current and to the point.  Again, it just needs links.  There’s a Bible study at 6pm on July 11th?  Great!  Where is it?  Who is leading it?  Give me a link with more info.

Next I went to the Ministries and to the youth page.  Good stuff.  I really like that you have photos of the leaders right there.

It might not be your department, but I have to question the text on the page.  In about 10 seconds I read (paraphrased, of course) “Come to our youth group, or you’ll go to hell”.  The entire page is about saving them.  Now, of course I think that’s important - that’s what the church is for.  I’ve always felt that is a horrible way to try to do it.  I’ve never heard anyone from a church tell me “I got a call from a guy last night that was reading our website and committed his life to Jesus”.  I’m sure people have been saved based on things they’ve read online, but that’s not what this page is for.  Someone is just looking to see what’s up with your youth group.  Get them excited about the church first, then you can slowly move them down the funnel.

From what I can tell, the youth meet for Sunday School at 10am each Sunday, and … that’s it?  No other events, trips, nothing?

Alright, let’s get off that and figure out how to get to the church.  Directions.  Great, simple page.  You give text directions from a variety of places, along with a Yahoo Maps link at the bottom.  Well done.

The Sunday bulletin is a surprise PDF.  Don’t surprise me with those.  That link should land on a page with a handful of recent bulletins, icons indicating that they’re PDFs, and a link to download Acrobat Reader.

The contact page is perfect.

Search engine optimization

When I search for a church in Gadsden by searching Google for “Gadsden church“, yours comes up 42nd.  That’s not good.  People new to the area looking online aren’t going to find you unless they’ve already heard about you.

In addition, the link that comes up is from your old GBGM page, with an old-school redirect to your new site.  Change that redirect to a 301 so Google and others know that it has moved.  That will pass all of the PageRank and trust from the old site to the new one, helping you to rank better more quickly.  This post covered that when I was talking about a church near us that changed URLs.

One thing that will help a ton is adjusting your title tags.  Part of the reason you rank so poorly for that Gadsden search is that you don’t have Gadsden anywhere on your home page.  I had to dig around a little to find it just to put in the title of this review!

My normal title suggestion is “church name - location - page”.   For example, the title tag of your youth page should be:

Whorton Bend United Methodist Church - Gadsden, AL - Youth Ministry

Just follow that same idea (or something similar) thoughout the site.

It seems that on most pages you use H2 tags to highlight the main content at the top.  Turn those into H1 tags.   You can use the same styling, so they can look exactly the same, but they’ll help you rank just a bit better.

Your HTML code looks great.  You’ve already got your CSS being called from an external file, and the rest of the code is nice and clean.  Well done.

More internal links would be very helpful.  I’ve already explained how they could help your users, but they could really help boost you up in Google as well.

This last tip is somewhat complicated, but I think you can handle is based on your CSS skills.  Right now, both wbumc.com and www.wbumc.com resolve on their own.  You should set it so that if someone tries to pull up a page without the “www” in front, your server will add it automatically.  Here is more info on why and how to do that.

Conclusion

This is a great site.  The style and colors are top notch!  The main thing it needs is just many more internal links.  Beyond that, here is a short summary of what I’d suggest:

• Change the picture on the front from a photo of a building to a photo of some people.
• Get rid of the animated Cross & Flame.  Use a static one if you want.
• The search engine doesn’t work - it returns an error.
• Get rid of the weather info.
• Flesh out the “Church Staff” page.
• Set-up a 301 redirect from your old URL to your new one.
• Create better title tags.
• Change your H2 tags on each page to H1 tags.
• Have your non-www pages resolve to www.

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