Site Review: Thalia UMC - Virginia Beach, VA

March 7, 2008 – 5:24 pm

Church: Thalia UMC - Virginia Beach, Virgina
URL: http://www.thaliaumc.org/

This site has a lot going for it. Ironically, the one thing I don’t like about the first page is the title tag, which happened to be the only thing I did like about the last site. The title tag never changes throughout the entire site, which is a major no-no. Read our post on good page titles to get that fixed up. Your city makes this easier to do, as you don’t need to worry about or not to abbreviate your state name. Abbreviate it, and you’ll still pick up the keywords for “Virginia” because of the city, and then “VA” for the state.

The menu system at the top is both good and bad. It’s good because it’s done with CSS, so that it is accessible to all users and to Google. The bad is that none of the main menu items are clickable. If I want to learn “About Thalia”, why can’t I click that? At the very least, have it land on a page that essentially just gives the sub-menu options again.

The content on the front page is superb. You give the worship info, contact info, directions link, church overview, and recent announcements all in one place. There are a few small tweaks I would suggest:

Give us pictures of the church, not the building.
Embed more links into the text. You did a great job of the in the announcements section, but the welcome message and sidebar info could use more links. What is “Holy Communion”? “Euchasrist”? “Sunday School”? Make them all clickable.

Being a visitor, I thought I’d check out the directions page next. Very well done. Large address, nice embedded map, and a link to get personalized directions at the bottom.

I went back up to the menu to decide where to go next. Personally, I don’t like the cute/vague menu options that you have (Learn, Teach, Live), but I know that others like that kind of thing. If I want info about the youth program, where would it be? I have no clue which one it’d be under.

I found the youth page under “Teach with Christ”. It’s a short page, but pretty good. I’d suggest adding years to your dates, simply because some sites are so outdated. You’re talking about events in July, but other sites are still talking about events from last July. Putting a year makes it very clear that you’re on the ball.

Why isn’t there a picture of Pastor Art on the Pastor Art page?

I wanted to dig in and find out a bit more about your worship services, but it doesn’t appear you have anything other than times. Are these traditional? Contemporary? What should I wear? Add a page with more worship info, then link it from the worship listings on the home page.

Your HTML is well-written. I didn’t validate it, but you do a few things very well — H1 tags are on each page, JavaScript is called from external sources, things like that.

Your “History” page shows a picture with the title “Now - 2006″. It should either say “Now” or “2006″, but not both since it’s not true.