When they changed to their new design a few years ago, I told them it might be a problem to have everything in Flash like that.  The site looks great and is easy to navigate, but the all-Flash approach is a killer.

For starters, Google can’t read much of it, including the primary navigation.  They’re a pretty large church (over 4000 members), yet Google only has 266 pages in their index.  That is bound to create a lot of missed opportunities.  It doesn’t matter how great your site is if people can’t find it.

Back to my problem — directions.  I found their directions page easily enough and the content on it is pretty good.  The address is always at the top of the page, and this page has both a map and text directions on it.  The problem is that it’s ALL buried in Flash!

I can hover over the map image to view it larger, but I can’t click on it to get a large jpg to print.  Since the text is all in Flash, it won’t print nicely either.  To the right is what their directions look like in the “print preview”.  Helpful, huh?

Also, this text being in Flash once again kills potential Google traffic.  For example, their directions page mentions that they’re near Perimeter Mall.  I doubt many churches can say that, but someone may search for it.  If we search for “church near perimeter mall“, they don’t even show up in the top 100!

This leads to three points:

• If your church is near a major landmark, be sure to mention it on your site, both for the sake of your visitors and for Google.
• If you put information like that on the site, make sure Google can see it.
• Make sure I can print your directions page!

As for me, I just went to Google Maps and printed directions from there instead.  I really just need to get a new GPS.

What are the main things new folks in town are looking for in a church website?  Is it information on specific ministries?  If so, which inistries does that tend to be?  Children and families? Is it service times and directions?

What are the MAIN few things?

It’s a remarkably difficult thing to answer.  Different people are looking for different things.  By looking into the long tail keywords that find your site you can get some idea, but it’s still very broad.

However, his e-mail said specifically “new folks in town”, which helps narrow it down quite a bit.  Based on that, we’ll assume a few things.  These wouldn’t be true in every case, but probably in most:

• They don’t know the area very well.
• They’re already Christians and they’re simply looking for a new church.
• There’s a good chance they already know what denomination they prefer and they’ll stick to it, though that’s becoming less important to a lot of people.

Based on those items, what’s important?  I would have to say, in random order:

• Directions/location.  Saying you’re on the “corner of 9th & Main” won’t help, since they don’t know where 9th or Main is.  Give them a good map, your full address, along with text based directions from each direction into town.  A photo of your building on the directions page can help put them more at ease too.
• Your service times/locations/types.  Do you have a contemporary service?  What’s it like?  What time is each service? What building is each service located in?
• Information for their kids.  Sunday school and nursery being the main two.  Where is the nursery?  What ages can go there?  Where is Sunday School for each grade?  Is there a program for their middle-schooler, or should they come to the service?
• Membership information.  I don’t like to push this information on new visitors too much, especially if they’ve never joined a church before, but this fictional family is probably looking to put down roots.  At the very least, provide some information on what your membership process looks like.

What else?  What other items do you think should be on the list?

Some of the specifics that Dean mentions:

• Bad Markup
• Browser-Specific Navigation — Things that only work in certain browsers
• Charging Money for Sermons
• Poor Navigation Hierarchy
• Too Much Flash

He gets into more detail about why each item can cause problems.  It’s a good read - check it out.

They’ll probably change it soon, so I’ve put a screenshot on the right. The have put some text on the top of their site in huge letters.  It reads:

WARNING! If you have received on overnight UPS package showing the shipper as iberty Hill Church your package contains counterfeit checks.  Liberty Hill DID NOT send these packages!

It takes up most of the space above the fold on the home page.  I can appreciate that this appears to be a major problem and they need to alert their congregation.  However, there are better ways to do this:

• E-mail everyone.  I’m sure they have e-mail addresses for most of the congregation.
• Call those that you couldn’t e-mail.
• Put it on the site in an obvious, but less-intrusive location.
• Announce it on Sunday mornings.

Text like this, especially in this location and size, is likely to scare off any first-time visitors to the site.  It’s a not brand-new situation, either.  The Google cache from a week ago shows it there, and it may have been up before then.  You have just a few seconds to tell a new user your primary message, and this is what you want to say?

A few other small notes:

• Part of the text is underlined, but isn’t linked.  I fully expected to be able to click on it.  Never underline text unless it’s a link.
• The “under construction” graphic is cute, but should never be used.  I realize there’s a new site coming, but you still have a content-rich site here.  Make it as good as you can until the new one is ready, then switch over.  A small “Get ready for the new site!” graphic would be fine, but the big “under construction” isn’t necessary.

The result of the “ZOMG!!!!!!!1111″ warning and the huge “under construction” pic means that the main content is way down on the front page — about 1100 pixels by my count.  That’s nearly two screens for a lot of users.

Liberty Hill Church is everything they claim at the bottom — God-seeking, Jesus-focused, Bible Based, etc.  They just need to make sure and tell people that message.

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.

All in all, you have done an excellent job with this site.  The suggestions I have (mostly taken from the text above):

• Fix the title tags
• Add a page for the worship services
• Add a few more embedded links on the front page
• Put a photo of some people on the front page
• Build a section with more information/photos about your building.

Other thoughts or comments?

Let’s start with the good news — this site has a well-done page title. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s get to work.

First off, I hate frames. There were some decent reasons for having them 10 years ago, but no excuse any more. You can’t bookmark an individual page, you can’t change titles on each page, external sites can’t link to a particular page, Google doesn’t index them well, they don’t work well on mobile browsers, etc. Step one is to get rid of those. You can keep your menu on the side of every page using a different method, such as SSI or PHP.

Next, why the graphical-based navigation? I let Crestline get away with it because they used some nice graphics, but in this case it needs to go. Change those to plain text, then style the background to look like buttons.

I don’t understand the header on the top of the site. Why are you telling me the URL again? I’m already on the page! Also, there’s no reason to use a verizon e-mail address, especially if it’s that prominent on the page. Your registrar and/or web host can set-up a simple forward, so that e-mail from “info@fumc-clarion.org” forwards over to your verizon account, allowing you to promote a much better looking e-mail address.

The Building Committee Master Plan is ok, but it breaks two major rules — don’t surprise me with a PDF and don’t say “click here”. If you have a PDF, make it very clear before the user clicks. Here is a good example (scroll down).

You did a good job with a prominent link to your worship information, which leads to a page with good info on it. I still have a few questions (”what do I wear?” being one), but you cover things pretty well.

Being new to your site, I clicked the “Visitors” link. The resulting page isn’t bad. You provide an address, phone and e-mail, which is always good.

Next, I decided to explore some ministries. Do you not have any youth? Or children? I see the daycare, but nothing about Sunday School for kids, VBS, etc.

Ahh, there it is — “church school”. I had no idea. Once I get there, it’s a pretty good page. I like the links to the floorplans, so I have some idea where I’m going.

Some church sites focus too much on their building, and you don’t have a problem with that. However, having never been to the church before, I’d love to see a picture of the outside somewhere — maybe on the “Find us” page. If I was coming to visit for the first time, I’d like to have some idea of what I’m looking for.

You could stand to mix a few more links into the text on the site. For example, on the “Disciple Bible Study” page (I can’t link to it because of the frames…), you say to “contact the church office” at the bottom. Why not link that to the “Talk to us” page?

Small thing — the copyright link at the bottom still says 2007 on some of the pages.

The graphic in the top left corner is annoying and, frankly, pretty cheesy. Looking at it honestly — do you think a non-believer will stumble on your site, see that graphic, then decide that they indeed need God? If so, then I suppose you can leave it, but I have to believe the answer is “no”.

You might want to remove the guestbook from the front page. It hasn’t had a new post in nearly three years, thus reflecting very poorly on the site.

I rarely say this — in fact, I don’t think I’ve suggested it on this blog yet — but this site probably just needs to be re-built from scratch. Most of the time, sites can be slowly improved and tweaked to become better and better. However, having to lose the frames and rebuild the navigation means that you may as well start fresh. You can certainly copy-and-paste a lot of your existing text onto the new site.

In most cases, you potentially would lose a lot of Google traffic if you did that. However, your frames and navigation style probably keep your Google traffic to a bare minimum anyhow, so I doubt there is much risk involved.

I’m sorry to be so harsh. I feel like the church is probably a wonderful community of folks, and I simply think that your site should better reflect that.

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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

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

We’ve installed a script that shows the “Top Commentators” on the site over the past month.  Those that leave the most comments to entries on this site (including this entry) get a link to their site shown.  Right now, it only takes one comment to get a link to your site!  Be sure to include your web address when leaving the comment, and your link will show up instantly on the right side of our site.

This link will send a little bit of direct traffic to your site, but it will also pass along some link juice that should give you a tiny boost in the search engines.

I hope it helps!

It’s focused largely on SEO and site monetization.  Many of the SEO tips will be relevant for your church site, though the monetization typically won’t be.

Most of my new general tips will go over there, though I still intend to post on here as I come across (or develop) useful things for church websites.

Thanks!

Mickey