Church Website Help

Site Review: Crestline UMC - Crestline, OH

Church: Crestline UMC - Crestline, Ohio
URL: http://www.gbgm-umc.org/crestlineumc/

When entering the title for this post, I needed to know where this church was located.  My eyes automatically went to the page title in the menu bar, but the location wasn’t there.  However, it was easy to find the text on the page, and the city is already in your church name (”Crestline”), so it’s probably not a big deal.

The site looks very nice.  Good colors, very bright, easy to read.  However, some of that comes at a price.  All of the main text on your home page is buried in images, which means it can’t be read by Google or by anyone that uses a screen reader.  In addition, none of the graphics have alt attributes assigned to them, which only makes the problem worse.

You can justify leaving the navigation as images.  I tend to advise against it, but you’ve made good use of the graphics.  Add some alt attributes to those and you’re good to go.  However, the text at the bottom with your address information needs to be plain text.  There is simply no reason to bury it in an image like that.

The counter at the bottom needs to go.  Install a nice Analytics program if you don’t already have one (I suggest Google Analytics, but there are other choices) and get ride of the Bravenet garbage.

Since I’m looking at the site as a first-time visitor, I next went to the “Maps & Schedules” page.  All in all, you did a very nice job with this page.  My only suggestion is to make some of those top items clickable.  The “Red Door Cafe” sounds neat, but what on earth is it?  Children are welcome, but is it for children?  Or for adults, but children can come?  Is it a worship service?  Or a dinner? I have no idea.

In general, you’re pretty bad about using “click here”.  I’m the first to admit that I’m guilty of it as well, but we all need to work on it.  I guess part of the problem is that it’s often embedded in an image, so people can’t easily tell that it’s clickable.  As you move some of the text out of images, you can start re-wording things a little better.  For example, on the Church Ministry page you have a piece of text that says “Click HERE for information on the Red Door Cafe“, when that would be better served as “More information about the Red Door Cafe” or something like that.

You don’t use H1 tags anywhere on your site, but you should have one on every page.  To be honest, I’m not sure how you’ll make them fit with your graphic-heavy pages, but it’s something to work on as you go forward.

Get Pastor Mike to update his page.  You link to it from every page on the site, but it is still showing his January entry.

Get a domain name.  For $10/year and less than $10/month, you can get your own domain name and hosting.  I certainly appreciate what GBGM is doing for churches, but the URL is a killer.  It’s simply awful.  At the very least, pick a nice domain name and forward it to your GBGM site so you have something better to give to people (crestlineumc.org, for example, instead of gbgm-umc.org/crestlineumc).

Make it easier to find your worship info.  It seems that the only place you have it listed is in the “Maps & Schedules” page.  You should build a separate “Worship Info” page and fill it up!  What kind of worship is it?  What should I wear?  Things like that.

All in all, you’ve done an excellent job.  A few small changes and a bit more info, and you’ll be all set.

Mickey