Church Website Help

New source for guitar tabs

This is a bit off-topic, but explains my sparce posting on here lately.  I’ve been working on a new resource for church worship leaders, and it’s just about ready to go — Tabs For Worship.

It’s somewhat similar to the other guitar tab sites out there, but with a few key differences:

• Less “stuff”, just music.  No CD reviews, no online store, no concert listings, etc.
• A vastly streamlined database structure.  So many artists cover the same song that the current structure of tab sites simply doesn’t make sense.  For example, we already show six different artists for “Here I Am To Worship“, and I’m sure there are more out there.  On most sites, you’d have to look under each artist’s section to see what tabs they have for each one, then decide on the best.  With TFW, they all point to the same page, giving you quick access to every version of the song that has been submitted to the site.  More about our database layout can be found here.
• No separation of “praise” music from the main database.  On most other sites, there is a “guitar/Christian” section, and then a “praise/worship” section.  Why?  We have it all in one database, with the artists, songs and albums extensively cross-linked so you can browse quickly.
• A clean, fast mobile site.  This won’t be of great value on a regular basis, but could be essential in a crunch.  Maybe you can’t remember the bridge to a certain song — just pull up the mobile site, find the song you want, view the tabs, and get on with it.
• No registration required, and certainly no payment required.  Many (but not all) sites require you to log-in before you can view the songs, and some even require payment.  Not us.  We want to help you find your information as quickly as possible, and registration is simply a barrier to that.  Of course, if you’d like to stick around we certainly encourage you to register and join our forums, but that’s definately not required.

Posted in CWH News | Tags: chords, guitar tabs, tfw |
2 Comments »

Don’t let your web design firm trash your Google rankings

Many of you are getting ripped off by your web design (or hosting) companies, and you don’t even know it.  A while back on my SEO blog I talked about the benefits of doing some minor PageRank sculpting to your site.  Another simple piece you could add to that is the tiny bit of text in the footer of your site that says “Powered by xxxxx” or “Created by xxxxx” or something to that effect.  That link is probably on every page of your site and is helping you leak PageRank like a sieve.

The solution is very simple.  Edit the code to include the “nofollow” attribute.  This will leave the link there for people to see and click, but Google will stop following it and it’ll help you focus your link juice on your other pages.  For example, the link probably looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

Simply add rel=nofollow in there, like this:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

That’s it!

Frankly, I get more upset about this the more I think about it.  Most design/development/hosting companies promise to give you great Search Engine Optimization and help you rank better, then steal a good chunk of your link juice for their own gain.  It’s awful!  I have never done that to a client and I never will.

If you’re a company that does this kind of work for churches and you already nofollow your links on their sites, please let me know in the comments below and I’ll give you some praise.

What if you want to take it further and sculpt your PageRank a bit more?  First, we need to explain what sculpting is — it’s simply the act of nofollowing certain links on your site to help focus the link juice on pages that are more important.  For example, the “privacy statement” on this blog is nofollowed.  I don’t care if it ranks well, and I’d rather get more link juice flowing to the posts on the blog.

On the right is a picture of our church website with the images turned off and the “NoDoFollow” FireFox plug-in turned on (click to view it full-size), to better visualize the link structure of the site.  The blue links are normal (“followed”) links, and the red links are nofollowed.  I’ll explain my reasoning for some of the nofollows:

• “Event Registration” on the right — This points to our third-party Event Registration service.  I want the individual events to rank well, but not the generic registration area.
• “Prayer Requests” on the left — This is just a form for people to fill out.  Why would I want it to rank well?
• The recent blog entries in the middle — We already link to the main blog twice on the home page, so we didn’t want to dilute the PageRank that much more.
• In the center column, you’ll see text duplicated side-by-side (“Preschool Fall Festival”, etc).  These are upcoming events.  The text the on the left is actually an image (view our normal site to see them).  No sense linking each event twice, so we’ll link the text-based version to pass better anchor text to the event page.

Posted in Search Engines | Tags: nofollow, pagerank, sculpting |
3 Comments »

How much does your church use Facebook? The answer might surprise you.

I’ve known for a while that our church had a variety of Facebook “groups”.  I had set up a church-wide group, and there were at least a handful of youth-related groups.  I figured maybe 8 or 10 total.  Wow, was I wrong.

I’ve spent the last few days searching, and I’ve found 42 groups so far!  It’s crazy.  About half of them (22) are by/for students, a few Sunday School classes have their own, our music ministry has 7 groups, our Academy has 3, and then there are a few others.  Even our MOPS ladies made their own group!

Now granted, a lot of them are tiny and/or dead (“Girls Retreat 07″), but many are quite vibrant.   So how does this affect you?

First, find your church groups that are out there already.  It’s taken me a while to track all of these down, and I’m sure there’s a few more out there.  Run some group searches with variations of your church name (“mount bethel”, “mt bethel”, “mt. bethel”, “mtb”, etc).  Once you’ve exhausted that, find church members on Facebook and see what groups they are already in.

Second, think about what other kinds of groups you can offer.  A church member built a group for Live it Live (children’s worship program at our church), and our media folks have started posting weekly videos to the group.  We also just added a group for our Encounter (contemporary) service, where they’ll be posting photos, videos, sermon notes, etc.  Both of those could be of great value to our members, and great outreach to potential visitors.

Once you’ve done that, you can cross-promote between Facebook and your site.  Link to Facebook groups from your site (“for more about our upcoming trip to Kenya, join our Facebook group“).  Link back to your site (when appropriate) from your Facebook group.

As church webmasters, we need to start letting go of a little control.  You used to want everyone to come to your site, and that’s still an admirable goal.  However, job #1 is getting information to those that need it, which often doesn’t involve your site.  Our blog posts go out to RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, Twitter users, FriendFeed users, etc.  Many people get our bulletin via e-mail, which has lots of great info on it.  We have a lot of members that subscribe to our Podcasts.  Others obviously use Facebook.  None of those people may visit our site, but that’s ok.  As long as they get the information, they’ll still hopefully visit the church and connect with people there, which is the main goal of church-related digital communications.

How else can you use Facebook to facilitate activites at your church?

Posted in Site Content | Tags: blog, facebook, friendfeed, groups, twitter |
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Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

• The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
• You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
• That’s it!

Posted in Search Engines, Web Browsers | Tags: chrome, search |
1 Comment »

How will “Chrome” affect your church site?

As you may have heard, Google is releasing a new browser tomorrow called Chrome.  Based on what’s been revealed so far, it should be excellent, though we won’t know for sure until we get our hands on it.  If nothing else, it’s expected to be very fast and very stable, which are the two main jobs of any decent browser.

But what about us webmasters?  Will we have to start worrying about another browser when building our sites?  Not really.  The great news about Chrome is that it’s built on top of Webkit, which also powers Opera (and a few others).  This means that the basic rendering engine is one that you’ve probably already checked your site against, so it’s nothing new.

Keep an eye on my SEO site tomorrow to see when Chrome is available for download.  If you have a Windows machine, it’ll certainly be worth trying, even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Update: It’s available!  You can download Chrome here.

Posted in Web Browsers | Tags: browsers, chrome, google, webkit |
1 Comment »

Salted Websites

You may have noticed the new ad on the top right side of the site for Salted Websites.  They’re a Christian web design firm looking to expand their business.

I told them that before I could run their ad, I had to see some of the work they’ve done.  One example they provided me with was for Grace Fellowship Church in Williamsburg, VA.  After looking over the site, I feel good recommending Salted Websites to you.

If you look through the GFC website and think about how it might be reviewed on here, you’ll realize that they do a pretty solid job.  The navigation is built in plain text, they use good page titles, and it has a nice, clean look.  I can’t really review the content of the site, since that is handled by the church and not by SW.

My only real complaint with the site is having the address/phone buried in an image.  It hurts your SEO (just a tiny bit, though) and makes it so I can’t copy/paste the info.  What if I want to drop the address into Google Maps and get directions?  I have to re-type it.  All things considered, though, that’s a very small issue compared to most church sites.

You can visit SW’s examples page to see a few more sites that they’ve built.  If you’re looking to get your church website redesigned, you should check them out.  Their prices are very reasonable and they seem to do a very good job.

If you have any questions, please view their FAQ or just fill out their contact form.

Update: Grace Fellowship Church is no longer using their design, so it’s a bad example.  To see a current example of their work, please visit overflowinglifechristiancenter.com.

Posted in Companies | Tags: hosting, salted websites, web design |
4 Comments »

More fun ways to use the Google Earth plugin

I just showed you how you could add a simple location via the Google Earth plugin to your site, but how about a series of locations?

Using EarthSwoop, I thought it’d be neat to show all of the places that we’re sending mission teams this summer.  You could do the same thing for local missions, youth group trips, or anything else outside of your church.

So, I put in all of our mission trip locations, then embedded it into the blog on our site.  Here it is:

Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

Posted in Site Content | Tags: earthswoop, google earth, missions |
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Another way to show a neat map on your website

A while back I showed you YourMap, an easy way to embed a Google Map on your site.  Google now makes it very easy to do that using their normal Maps site, but here’s a new tool — ShareIt.

Google has recently released the “Google Earth Plugin”.  It’s a free plug-in that runs Google Earth (3D buildings and everything) right in your browser!  It’s quite slick.

The problem is that it’s kind of a pain to use it on your site.  The Digital Earth Blog just did a round-up of the best ways to use it to embed a map in your site, but I think the clear winner for churches is ShareIt.  It makes it very simple to add a map to your site — probably less than 30 seconds to get the code you need.  Here is what it looks like on your site:

Powered by Google Earth Hacks | Map Details | Create your own!

Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Posted in Site Content | Tags: google earth, maps, plugin |
4 Comments »

Twitter, FriendFeed and your church website

By now, you’ve probably heard all about Twitter, the very popular micro-blogging service.  If not, here is a short video explaining it:

At our church, we struggled for a while to find a good way to use this to help reach our congregation, but we’re finally starting to use it effectively.  We’ve come up with a few good uses for it so far:

• http://twitter.com/mtbethelumc — This is essentially just a feed from our blog, using the WordPress plug-in called Twitter Tools.  We plan to expand it to cover more topics, but it’s just a blog feed for now.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelmusic — Our Senior High Choir Tour is currently in progress, and they’re using Twitter to keep the congregation (especially their parents!) informed about the trip.  We’ve done this with other trips, with decent success.
• http://twitter.com/mtbethelrec — We have a very active recreation ministry, and this is updated if conditions on our field are bad, so parents know whether games have been canceled or not.  It’s very useful for the parent on the go to get a text message with the info, rather than having to pull up the website or call the church office.  We also push this Twitter feed to our main website and our mobile website, using a free script called Twitter2HTML.

Other churches are starting to get on board.  Oak Leaf Church has just launched a Twitter feed.  There’s not much there yet, but they plan on adding things such as important announcements, prayer requests, etc.

The great thing about Twitter is that it works for users of any skill level.  If you just want updates, click the link and read them.  Want an RSS feed?  Subscribe.  Have your own Twitter account?  Follow ours.  Want to stay even more informed? Follow ours and enable text messaging.

All of this Twittering leads to a growing problem: fragmentation.  Using our church as an example, we have a YouTube account, a SmugMug account, a blog, three podcasts and five twitter accounts.  How to keep up?  Enter FriendFeed.

FriendFeed is a quickly growing service that helps pull together all of your various feeds.  We have a FriendFeed account that pulls all 11 of those feeds onto one page.  I have a page of my own that pulls information from 14 sources.  We haven’t started promoting it for the church very much yet, but I’m making sure our account is as connected as possible, because the service is growing very quickly.

How does your church use Twitter? Have you started working with FriendFeed yet?  Or any other similar services?

Posted in Site Content | Tags: blog, friendfeed, podcast, smugmug, twitter, youtube |
1 Comment »

People might want to print your directions page

I need to go to Dunwoody UMC tomorrow for a seminar, so I went to their site to pull up directions.  My GPS is dead, so I’m having to do it the “old-fashioned” way by looking up directions on-line.

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.

Posted in Search Engines, Site Content | Tags: directions, dunwoody, google maps |
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