Church Website Help

Site Review: FUMC - Elgin, IL

Church: First UMC - Elgin, IL
URL: http://gbgmchurches.gbgm-umc.org/fumcelgin/

Initial thoughts

For some reason, the first thing I noticed on this site was the nice, clean list of links down the left side. That’s not a bad thing. However, part of the reason I noticed that was because the images were loading so slowly. Part of it was apparently a GBGM hiccup, but the other part was your rather huge files. As a general rule, you should resize files to the exact size you need before you upload them to the website. Doing it the way you have with the photos of Rev. Hutchison and Rev. Walker make the pictures look fuzzier (your photo software can resize them more smoothly than a browser) and they take longer to load.

The center of the home page seems to be missing something. It’s as if you designed it for current members, but didn’t think too much of the new visitors. Having the bullets of current service/sermon info is nice, but some opening text would be good. Something that would back up the “THE BEST PLACE TO BE!” statement at the top. Something like “We’re the best place to be because of our growing youth program (linked), our powerful worship services (linked) and our amazing children’s programs (linked).”

The “Manna Express” link seems like it was just kind of randomly put there.

The purpose and mission statement will be nice for other Christians to see, but will scare off any non-Christians pretty quickly.

Browsing around

Next I went to the calendar to see what was up at the church. It’s a nice full calendar, but I was disappointed to see that it was just a large graphic. I know that changing it to a text-based calendar would be a lot of work, but it would help quite a bit. 8am Pilates sound good to me, but where do I go? Can I e-mail someone some questions about it first?

My next move was over to the directions page. I wonder where the rest of the site went (header, menu, etc), but other than that this is a pretty solid page. (note: I later realized I had opened in a new window, on purpose, but the frames didn’t come with it.)  I like the dual maps in there, along with the brief text based directions. I’d suggest two small additions to the page: 1 - Put the full address at the top; include city, state, ZIP. 2 - Put a link to MapQuest that drops me at your church so I can browse around on there.

Now I went to the worship page to see what a typical service looks like. This page again suffers from the oversize image problem and seems short on info. I assume these are traditiona UMC services, but I have no way of knowing for sure. Also, while the “infant nursery” sounds useful, I need more information. What ages can go in the nursery? Can I volunteer to help? Link those items on the right (under “Event”) so I can get more information about each one. I like the links at the bottom (”Recent Messages”, “Sunday’s Message Notes”, “Worship Bulletin”), so I’ll follow one of those.

So, I went to worship bulletin to see what that looks like — maybe it’ll give me a clue about what a service looks like. Instead of getting a bulletin, I get a note telling me “The Sunday Worship Bulletin will be posted later this week”. That’s fine, but where is last week’s bulletin? Ahh, a note at the bottom telling me where to find it. Why not a link directly to the one from last week?

Following the link at the bottom doesn’t help. It says to “click on Home Page and then click on ‘See xx/xx/xx’ date”. The home page has no such links.

Search engine optimization

This is a major problem.  Elgin isn’t a huge city (just over 100,000), yet your church comes up 90th when I search google for “elgin church“.  People Googling for a new church home in your area will never find you.

A big part of that problem is the use of frames on the site.  This makes it more difficult for Google to index individual pages, and makes it impossible for users to bookmark or e-mail specific pages.  In addition, you can’t create unique title tags for each page.

While framed sites can save the webmaster some work, there are alternatives that are just about as simple, but help avoid the other problems.  SSIs (server-side includes) and PHP includes are the first two that come to mind, but there are other options as well.

Your only visible title tag is pretty good.  When you change away from frames, here is my suggested format for the others on the site.

You don’t appear to be using H1 tags at all.  The top of every page should have one as a brief sample of what the page is about (”Sermons”, “Worship”, etc).

You could stand to build a few more pages to flesh out some content (the nursery comes to mind) and then build in a ton more internal links to get people the information they need more quickly.

Conclusion

The site has a nice clean look, but seems short on information.  The summary of my suggestions:

• Get rid of the frames and use some kind of include to produce similar results.
• Resize all pictures to the exact size you need before you upload them to the site.
• Put a little more text on the home page to give me a little idea of what the site is about.
• Add more info to the worship page.
• Make the few tweaks I suggested to the directions page.
• Use H1 tags on your pages.

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