Church Website Help

Site Review: FUMC – Wabash, IN

Church: First UMC – Wabash, Indiana
URL: http://www.wabashfirstumc.org/

My first thought when I pulled up this site was that it felt a bit dated. While I still tend to use tables more than I probably should, this site uses tables a LOT. However, the choice of colors is pretty good and the text is easy to read, so the tables themselves aren’t a big deal.

I like the fact that most of the links are plain text. I take that back — they’re not! For some reason, the links in both side menus are generated using JavaScript. They’re just simple hover color changes, so there’s no reason for that. In addition to chewing up a bit more bandwidth, they are completely hidden from Google, users with screen readers, and most mobile phones.

To make matters worse, they don’t degrade well.  If you don’t have JavaScript, you get a message that essentially says “Too bad — go away”.  Not good.

To tackle some other common Search Engine Optimization areas:

Page URLs
Pretty good.  Things like “spiritual_life.html” and “history_home.html”.

Page Titles
Decent.  They change on each page, but they lose the church name and city/state on every page but home.  Check out my post on Good Page Titles for some ideas.

H1 Tags
None!  Each page should have the main text on each page wrapped in an H1 tag.  For example, on the history page, the text “History of the First United Methodist Church” should be in an H1.

A quick search for “Wabash Sunday School” has your church coming up around 23rd in Google, but that’s just your Wordpress blog, and it doesn’t have any links to get to your main website.  Your main site didn’t appear until result # 100!  For a search query that specific, that’s pretty bad.

A few other random notes:

• What’s with the wheelchair icon in the bottom left corner?  I don’t know what it means, and I can’t click on it for more information.
• I expect the Cross and Flame in the top left corner to take me back to the home page.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.
• Contact info is on every page — very good.
• The map page just links out to Google Maps.  I would expect a page on your site with some mapping information (text directions, etc), which then includes a link to Google Maps from there.
• It took me a while to find basic worship service information.  As a first-time visitor, I had no idea that’s what “Christ Alive!” was.
• What should I wear?  I didn’t see any picture of people in worship, so I don’t know if I’ll be under-dressed in a golf shirt, or over-dressed with a tie.
• The “Contact Us” link on the main “Christ Alive!” page (at the top) doesn’t work.
• There are very few links in the body of each page.  Again looking at the “Christ Alive!” page:
  • Where is your “Ministry Activity Center”?
  • I should be able to click “Sunday School” for more info.
  • What is “mid-morning worship” vs. “Christ Alive! Worship”?
  • How can I contact Pastor Laura?

That’s probably enough for now.  There are a number of things that need to be tweaked, but the JavaScript menus need to be the first to go.  There is no reason for them, and they create a number of unnecessary headaches.

Using whatever statistic software you use, take a look at how many visitors came from Google in the past month.  Fix the menus, wait a few months, and try again.  I’ll bet the number is at least five times higher.  Those are people looking for a church (or even a specific ministry) in your area.  Let them find you.

It’s very obvious by looking at the site that you have put a lot of time into it.  There is a ton of content on there, but you just need to make sure it can be found by everyone (Google) and accessed by everyone.

Mickey

Posted in Site Reviews | |