Church Website Help

Site Review: Hillsdale UMC - Hillsdale, NJ

Church: Hillsdale UMC - Hillsdale, NJ
URL: http://www.gbgm-umc.org/hillsdale-umc/

Initial thoughts

Oddly enough, my first thought when viewing this site was “what’s up with the text in their header?”. It appears that you compressed the header jpg just a bit too much, as the letters are all surrounded by artifacts. I wouldn’t increase it much, but it could stand to be a bit less compressed.

As I skimmed the rest of the page, it seemed that the site was focused more on current members and than visitors. Of course, that’s a very hard line to balance and my time on the rest of the site may prove that false.

One thing this webmaster was concerned about was their JavaScript-driven menu at the top. I typically advise against using a JS menu, but I’m really against it if there is no alternative. If I disable JavaScript in my browser and refresh, I am told “Your browser does not support script”. Ouch. About 10% of users out there don’t have JS and these folks are dead meat on this site.

Fortunately, the fix is pretty easy. In the “noscript” area of the code where you tell me “your browser does not support script”, you could change that to a static menu with the base links. Very easy. However, this brings up another problem - the base links don’t work! Even with JS enabled and the menu working, I get an error if I click on “About Us”. Looking in the code tells me that it’s pointed to “http://” (right - no address there).

What needs to be built is a page for each of those base items that don’t yet have a page (About Us, Forms, Links) . This will elimate the error message and it will also make the fix for the non-JS users pretty simple. These pages don’t need to be much. For example, the “About Us” page could be this:

Here are some pages with more information about our church:

• Worship
• History
• Nostalgia
• Ministers
• Calendar
• Newsletter
• Outreach

That’s it! Just link each item in the list to their page and the problem is solved. The menu will still cause some problems for your search engine rankings, but we’ll discuss that later in the review.

Browsing around

I figured I’d try to get directions to the church.  I love the “enter your address” box — I had a similar item on the directions page at my last church.  However, it still would be nice to toss a map on the page; partly to give a general idea where you are, as well as spice up the page a bit.  Also, the image at the top (direct4.gif) is broken.

Next I went over to the worship page to see what a service is like.  I’m a bit confused why you have a link to your history there, but it’s not a big deal.  The only thing I’d change is where it says “click on picture…”.  Never tell a user to click somewhere else.  If you want to give them a link, give them a link!  You can have the picture be a link, but that text should also link to it.

By reading the page, it seems that I can go to Worship or Sunday School, but not both.  They’re both at 10am, so I simply have to choose.  Is that accurate?

The rest of the page seems pretty logical.  I would suggest that most sections be given links for more info, but I guess that’s all of the info that you have right now.  The very bottom is strange, though - a link to ENTRIX.  What is that?  It seems like it’s under the Senior High section, but reading the page makes it sound like it’s for slightly older folks (20-30ish).  Even visiting the page gives me little clue why the link is there.

Next I went to the pastors page.  It’s a neat page, but gives me painfully little control.  I wanted to see a photo of your current pastor (his photo won’t always be on the front), but I guess I’d have to sit here and watch all of the others first.  I should be able to click their name to see a photo of that pastor.

Finally I tried to go to the contact us page.  For some reason it wouldn’t load.  I looked in the code and discovered that it’s simply a mailto link.  It must be some issue with the JavaScript, as mailto links work fine for me on other sites.

Search engine optimization

If my family moved to the area, we’d begin our search for a church by typing hillsdale church into Google.  You currently come up 19th for that, which means we’d probably never even see your site.

There’s a few things you can do to improve that.

First, you need to at least change the JS menu using the tips I mentioned above.  Google can’t real JavaScript, so it has a difficult time navigating your site.  If you add the “noscript” items I suggested and build in a few more root pages, it will be of great benefit to Google (not to mention your non-JS users).

Also, the HTML code for that menu is massive.   I didn’t do an exact count, but it’s well over 500 lines of code in every page on your site.  That will not only slow your dial-up users way down, but it makes every word on the page very diluted in the eyes of Google.  You should be able to move most of that code to an external file and reference it there, similar to how you reference your external CSS file.  That would help quite a bit.

Your title tags are pretty good.  I normally suggest putting the city/state in there as well, but since your city and your church name are already the same, it’s not completely necessary.

Your H1 tags are interesting.  I normally tell churches to make sure they have one on each page.  In your case, you need to get rid of a few.  For example, your worship page has seven of them.  A good page will have just one.

In the case of your worship page, the word “worship” should be in the H1.  The items below it should be using H2-H4 tags.  Think of it like making an outline.   H2 come under H1, H3 come under H2, etc.  Having multiple H2/H3/H4 is fine, but try to follow the proper nesting.  For example:

<H1>Worship</H1>
<H2>Sunday Worship Service - 10 AM</H2>
<H3>Sunday School - 10 AM</H3>
<H3>Nursery</H3>
<H4>Nursery School</H4>
<H3>Chancel Choir</H3>
<H3>Youth Choir</H3>
<H3>Chapel Choir</H3>
<H2>Youth Enhancement</H2>
<H3>Junior High School</H3>
<H3>Senior High</H3>

If you find that you really need more than a single H1 on a page, that means you have more than one main topic for the page.  If you have more than one main topic, you need to split it into multiple pages.

I would also suggest a bit more internal linking.  If you mention the nursery, I should be able to click on it for more info about it (where it is?  who is in charge?  can I e-mail a question?  how old can my child be?).   It seems that things are linked pretty well and there just isn’t enough content there yet.  As you have time, answer as many questions as possible so that people feel more comfortable when they come to visit.

Conclusion

The site is pretty good.  I would expect more general info on the front page, but I’ll chalk that up to the temporary new pastor greeting.

The summary of my suggestions:

• Build landing pages for each of the root items in the menu.
• Build a simple, plain text menu for the noscript folks.
• Do something different with the “contact us” button, since it doesn’t work.  Maybe build a simple “contact us” page with phone and e-mail info on there.
• Move as must JavaScript as possible to external files.
• Add a map to the directions page.
• Try to rework the pastors page to give users a bit more control.
• Re-save the header image with slightly better quality.
• Re-work your H1-H4 tags.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Whorton Bend UMC - Gadsden, AL

Church: Whorton Bend UMC - Gadsden, AL
URL: http://www.wbumc.com/

Initial thoughts

My first thought was “hey, what a slick looking site”.  Really, it does look very nice.  However, my second thought was “didn’t we use that cheesy animated Cross and Flame on our youth site in 1999?”.  Seriously, I think we did.

Also, I noticed a picture of your church right below the menu.  Please don’t do that.

I assume the God Bless America graphic is just there for the July 4th stuff.

There is an error message under the “Sunday, July 8th” section on the side.  You’ll want to fix that.

What’s up with the handicap symbol near the bottom?  Your church is handicap-accessible?  Or your site is?  Or what?  At least let me click on the graphic so you can explain why it’s there.

The weather info can probably go.  I think most churches add that simply because they can.  “Because I can” is always a horrible reason to add something to your site.

The text on the main page is good — I read about half of it before I got bored and it sounded nice.  You probably need to trim it down, if possible.  Also, that text should be loaded with links.  If you’re telling me how great the youth are, link me to them.  You like to boast of your musical program?  Take me to their page!  That text on the front should easily have 50 links in it.  The worst thing you can do is get me excited about a program and wanting to learn more, and then make me go hunt for the page.  I’m right there reading about it - give me a link!

Browsing around

I thought I’d check out the “Church Staff” page to see what was going on there.  I’ll assume you haven’t really gotten to it yet, as there’s not much of anything there.  At the very least, I would expect photos and contact info for each person.

Ok, how about “Church News“?  This is a great little page - short, current and to the point.  Again, it just needs links.  There’s a Bible study at 6pm on July 11th?  Great!  Where is it?  Who is leading it?  Give me a link with more info.

Next I went to the Ministries and to the youth page.  Good stuff.  I really like that you have photos of the leaders right there.

It might not be your department, but I have to question the text on the page.  In about 10 seconds I read (paraphrased, of course) “Come to our youth group, or you’ll go to hell”.  The entire page is about saving them.  Now, of course I think that’s important - that’s what the church is for.  I’ve always felt that is a horrible way to try to do it.  I’ve never heard anyone from a church tell me “I got a call from a guy last night that was reading our website and committed his life to Jesus”.  I’m sure people have been saved based on things they’ve read online, but that’s not what this page is for.  Someone is just looking to see what’s up with your youth group.  Get them excited about the church first, then you can slowly move them down the funnel.

From what I can tell, the youth meet for Sunday School at 10am each Sunday, and … that’s it?  No other events, trips, nothing?

Alright, let’s get off that and figure out how to get to the church.  Directions.  Great, simple page.  You give text directions from a variety of places, along with a Yahoo Maps link at the bottom.  Well done.

The Sunday bulletin is a surprise PDF.  Don’t surprise me with those.  That link should land on a page with a handful of recent bulletins, icons indicating that they’re PDFs, and a link to download Acrobat Reader.

The contact page is perfect.

Search engine optimization

When I search for a church in Gadsden by searching Google for “Gadsden church“, yours comes up 42nd.  That’s not good.  People new to the area looking online aren’t going to find you unless they’ve already heard about you.

In addition, the link that comes up is from your old GBGM page, with an old-school redirect to your new site.  Change that redirect to a 301 so Google and others know that it has moved.  That will pass all of the PageRank and trust from the old site to the new one, helping you to rank better more quickly.  This post covered that when I was talking about a church near us that changed URLs.

One thing that will help a ton is adjusting your title tags.  Part of the reason you rank so poorly for that Gadsden search is that you don’t have Gadsden anywhere on your home page.  I had to dig around a little to find it just to put in the title of this review!

My normal title suggestion is “church name - location - page”.   For example, the title tag of your youth page should be:

Whorton Bend United Methodist Church - Gadsden, AL - Youth Ministry

Just follow that same idea (or something similar) thoughout the site.

It seems that on most pages you use H2 tags to highlight the main content at the top.  Turn those into H1 tags.   You can use the same styling, so they can look exactly the same, but they’ll help you rank just a bit better.

Your HTML code looks great.  You’ve already got your CSS being called from an external file, and the rest of the code is nice and clean.  Well done.

More internal links would be very helpful.  I’ve already explained how they could help your users, but they could really help boost you up in Google as well.

This last tip is somewhat complicated, but I think you can handle is based on your CSS skills.  Right now, both wbumc.com and www.wbumc.com resolve on their own.  You should set it so that if someone tries to pull up a page without the “www” in front, your server will add it automatically.  Here is more info on why and how to do that.

Conclusion

This is a great site.  The style and colors are top notch!  The main thing it needs is just many more internal links.  Beyond that, here is a short summary of what I’d suggest:

• Change the picture on the front from a photo of a building to a photo of some people.
• Get rid of the animated Cross & Flame.  Use a static one if you want.
• The search engine doesn’t work - it returns an error.
• Get rid of the weather info.
• Flesh out the “Church Staff” page.
• Set-up a 301 redirect from your old URL to your new one.
• Create better title tags.
• Change your H2 tags on each page to H1 tags.
• Have your non-www pages resolve to www.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Immanuel UMC - Ripon, WI

Church: Immanuel UMC - Ripon, WI
URL: http://www.riponumc.org/

Initial thoughts

As you might expect, my eyes were first drawn to the animation in the corner. My thought is that you need to get rid of it, but that decision obviously lies with you. My thought is that:

• A - Any Christian that visits the site doesn’t need to hear that message.
• B - Any non-Christian visiting the site won’t listen to that message. They’ll think “here we go again…” and move on.

I certainly could be wrong, but I just don’t think that needs to be the first thing that every visitor sees.

As for the rest of the home page, it’s pretty good. It’s got a nice clean look and not too much text. It could stand to have an image or two thrown in to help break things up, but I’m always a big fan of a simple look.

Having the contact info on the home page is always good. The one thing you really need on that page are more links. Let me click on things like “Traditional Worship Service”, “Praise I singing”, “Rev. Paul Nulton” and things like that for more information.

What’s up with the “Are Your Kitchen Knives Dull?” link at the bottom? At first I thought it was a clever attempt to promote a new Bible Study or something, but it’s just a link to knives on eBay. I hope there’s a good story behind that, or else it reflects very poorly on your site.

Also, I get a JavaScript error when the page loads, both in Firefox and IE. You’ll probably want to check that out.

Browsing around

Next up I tried to go to “About Us“, but it appears that I can’t — I have to go to one of the sub-menus. You really need to build a page for “About Us”, even if it’s little more than links to the sub-pages. People expect to be able to click on it, so let them. So, I went into the “staff” page. It looks good - I like seeing nice large pictures of staff members, so good job. However, I’d suggest that you build a separate page for each one, mostly so you can reference them individually from various places on the site.

Also, is there no contact info for individual staff members? No phone, no e-mail, nothing? It sure looks that way.

Next I went into the “Ministries” page. The first thing I get is a list of the main ministries offered at your chuch, which is good. However, I have to wonder why those don’t show up as drop-downs below the main “Ministries” button.

From that page I wandered into Children’s Ministry to see what you would have for my kids. Hello - new window! What was that for? Never give me a new browser window unless I ask for it — it’s just bad manners.

I’ve said before that I like a good, clean page. That being said, if any page needs some photos, it’s the children’s page. Give me some smiling faces to make me feel good about the program. The rest of the page would be good, but it’s all out of date. I guess some of the stuff from last fall/winter might still apply, but every date I can find on there is behind us.

So let’s try the youth events. This page is much more up to date (a little behind, but certainly acceptable), but it’s lacking links. Suppose I wanted to come to an event. I see that next week they’ll be having dinner at Shannon’s home at 6:30. Shannon who? How do I contact her? Where do I go? Since I already went to the staff page, I assume you’re talking about Shannon Rogers. However, even going back there doesn’t give me any info to help me contact her.

Ideally, the word “Shannon” on this page would be linked to a page just for Shannon Rogers. On that page would be her photo and bio (like you already have), along with phone and/or e-mail.

Next I decided to look at the sermons. I expected MP3s, but got Word Docs instead. Having a text format for the sermon info is great, but using Word is a bad decision because not everyone has Word. If they don’t have it, it’s like $90 to get it. Post those as PDF files instead, because the PDF reader is free.

Finally, I cruised down to the calendar to see what was going on. New window - duck! I’m quite impressed with the number of activites shown, as it shows that you’re a very active church. However, I once again am longing for more links. A 9-10 AM “prayer and share” sounds like it might be good, but I can promise I won’t be there - I have no idea where it is, what it is, or what to expect. Same with the “Survivors of suicide support group”. It might be exactly what I need, but I don’t have any details about it.

Search engine optimization

Ripon doesn’t strike me as a big town, yet you come up 40th in Google when I search for “ripon church“. People new to the area are unlikely to find your church online unless they’ve been told about it by a friend.

Let’s start with your title tags. Your home page title tag is great “Immanuel United Methodist Church - Ripon, WI”. In fact, I wouldn’t change it a bit. However, on the other pages you’ll probably want to tweak it. Use that same format and just put “- page name” at the end. For example, on your “youth events” page, you’d want it to be:

Immanuel United Methodist Church - Ripon, WI - Youth Events

It appears that you use H1 tags on most pages - very good! They’re styled to look fairly small, but that’s fine. Well executed.

Your HTML code could use a lot of clean-up. The main problem is that you have a ton of CSS on every page. That’s fine, but you don’t need to include that style information every time. You can put that all into an external file and then just reference it on each page. That will make every page much, much lighter. You’ve also got a bit of JavaScript that could be tossed into external files as well, though you need to fix it first.

Conclusion

Overall, the site is pretty good. There are a few things that could use some tweaking and a couple things that need to go. To summarize:

• Consider getting rid of the animation on the home page.
• Create individual pages for each staff member.
• Link everything you can internally (places, events, people, etc).
• Move your CSS and JavaScript to external files.
• Clean up your title tags just a bit.
• The “Are You Kitchen Knives Dull” really needs to go. Unless there is some decent explanation for that, in my mind it is completely inappropriate to use the church website for something like that.
• Stop having some of the pages open in new windows.
• Change the sermon Word Docs to PDFs.
• Add a few pictures here and there, especially in the children’s area. Use real faces, not buildings or clip art.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Mt. Zion UMC - Grandy, NC

Church: Mt. Zion UMC - Grandy, NC
URL: http://www.mtziongrandy.org/

Initial thoughts

This just looks like a fun church. I love the pictures on the front and things seem to be pretty active. There’s maybe a bit too much going on here, but I wouldn’t get rid of much.

Some of the “Jesus junk” could probably go (the gold cross and the fish with the drop shadow). They’re not bad, but do they serve a purpose at all?

The text under the cross could use some links. Let me click on “Sunday School” or “Worship Service” or “Children’s Church” to get more information.

The mission statement could stand to be on another page, as could the Upper Room Devotional.

The rest of the front page could probably stay, so let’s dig into a page.

Browsing around

If a site has one, I usually like to start with the “visitor welcome page” so lets go there. This page has got a lot of text on it, but its broken up well into categories. The photos on the side help to break it up, too. As with the front page, more links on here would be nice.

For example, you mention the “front, side or back doors”. Why not a link on each of those to a picture of the respective doors? The more comfortable you can make a visitors before they visit, the better.

Also, you mention things like “nursery”, “sanctuary”, “Sunday School”, etc, that could really use links to more info.

“What should I wear?” So many churches forget to add this. It’s always great to see.

Next I figured I’d click on the “Rev. David J. Blackman” text at the top of the home page, since many visitors might go there first.

Having a photo of the minister is a must, so good job. The e-mail and phone also needs to be easy to find, and you’ve done a good job of that. After that, though, the page kind of gets away from you — it’s far too long. You probably just need a link after the minister to “staff” and then one for “committees”. I visited a page about the minister and ended up with things about a yard sale and golf tourament. Certainly valid information, but not in the right place.

Next I went to the “Calendar & News”. The calendar is very cute. It’s got the calendar look to it, but it’s using plain text (not a giant scanned image like some churches). Again, though, it’s missing links. I might be interested in something in there, but none of it gives very much detail.

Search engine optimization

The biggest problem you have right now in terms of SEO is the way your URL is used. While I can understand why you wanted to mask the GBGM URL with your own, it makes usability and SEO quite a pain. Google will have a hard time indexing individual pages, people can’t link to specific pages on your site, and I can’t send links to my friends to specific pages. If you aren’t willing or able to purchase web hosting outside of GBGM, then simply use their URLs. Have your main URL work for the home page, but then let it use the GBGM URL for the rest of the pages. It’s ugly, but it’s the better way to go.

Your title tags are all the same, which is a big no-no. Each one should reflect the page you’re on. I would suggest a typical page should look like this:

Mt. Zion United Methodist Church - Grandy, NC - Missions

You don’t seem to be using H1 tags at all. Instead, you’re doing things like “font size=5″. This will give a similar appearance to your users, but it’s much worse for Google. Look at changing the main header text on each page to H1s.

Your main navigation links (with the leaves) are all images rather than text. They look like text to you and me, but they look like garbage to Google and sight-impared users. You use alt attributes on them, which is good, but I’m not sure how effective they are when they’re buried in all of that JavaScript. I would advise losing the leaves and going with plain text. You can use CSS to give a simple rollover, and it’ll help your pages load much more quickly, be compatible with more users and rank better in the search engines.

The actual HTML code in your pages is pretty solid. There’s a lot of extra JavaScript in there to handle the leaf rollovers, but it’s not too bad. Still, this is one more reason to lose the leaves.

Conclusion

The site has a very friendly feel to it, which I love.  Here is a summary of some of things I would look at doing to make it even better:

• Change the leaf navigation to plain text and spice it up with CSS however you wish.
• Use the GBGM URL or else get your own hosting.
• Break some of the longer pages into separate ones (like the page for your Minister).
• Fix your title tags.
• Start using H1 tags instead of big font tags.
• Add more internal links everywhere you can.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: St. Matthew’s UMC

Church: St. Matthew’s UMC - Fayetteville, NC
URL: http://www.stmattnc.org/

Initial thoughts

I like to avoid saying too much about the design of a site, simply because that’s not my strong suit. However, a few things from a design perspective jumped out at me as being very “90’s”. Specifically, the textured background, the wide border on the tables and the visitor counter at the bottom. Those might need to be changed.

For now the third site in a row, we are greeted by a photo of a building. In this case it’s kind of a neat, artsy shot, but it’s still just a building. Show me faces!

I’m also a bit taken aback by the vast amount of content on the home page. That’s not a good thing. Make your initial impact and then provide nice navigation to the other parts of the site - don’t try to cram it all on one page. Let’s go through it a piece at a time:

• Address/phone/e-mail at the top - great!
• The links for more info. Short, easty to read links - very good.
• The Church Newsletter. Here’s where we start to have problems. There is absolutely no reason to have this many newsletters on the front page. You could make a case for having the most current one up there, but that’s it. The rest need to go in their own area.
• Who Are We? Keep it
• Other Methodist Links - Put them on their own page
• Church Directors - Put them on their own page
• Web Site for Kids - Put them on their own page
• UMNS - Put it on its own page
• Online Bible Search Utilities -Put it on its own page
• Daily Blessings and The Upper Room - Move them to their own page
• Health and Welfar of the UMC - Move it to its own page
• Visitor counter - Get rid of it
• The contact info at the bottom - not bad. I’m not sure you need the “last updated”, but the rest of it is fine.
• The weather info at the botoom - Get rid of it

Browsing around

So lets browse around a bit. I figure I’ll start with the “visitors welcome information“. The first thing I notice is there is no navigation from here. In fact, the only link on the whole page is a link back to the home page at the very bottom. A page like this should have links sprinkled all throughout it. If you mention “worship” or “nursery” or “UMYF” or any of that, it should be linked to a page with more info about that program. A photo or two might help spice the page up. Also, the page stretches to fill the width of the screen, which makes it really wide on my monitor. Long lines of text are difficult to read. You might want to wrap the whole page in a table or a div and limit it to 600-700 pixels wide.

Next up we’ll look at the directions. This is a very well done page. I love all of the links to show people exactly where to enter the building. That kind of things give visitors one less thing to worry about the first time they come to the church. All of the links mixed in this page are exactly the kind of thing you need back on the “visitors welcome information” page.

Going from that page to the Worship Schedule was kind of a let-down. There’s hardly anything there! If nothing else, drop a picture of a service in progress on the page so visitors can get a feel for what it’s like.

The staff page is very nice. I like that you gave each staff member their own page, along with a photo and short bio. Well done.

Search engine optimization

If I was new to Fayetteville and looking for a church home, the first thing I would do is go to Google and search for “fayetteville church“. As of right now, you are the 60th result that comes up for that. Anyone new to Fayetteville will look at 59 other church websites before they’ll even glance at yours. In other words, they won’t find you.

Fortuantely, there are things you can do to help that. The first thing would be to create more pages. Start by splitting the home page up based on some of the ideas I gave you near the beginning on the review. Then start working on other areas that are missing, such as the nursery.

Your title tags aren’t horrible, but they could use some work. Simply changing these will probably have you up 10-20 places in that Google search. Right now, I see tags like this:

• St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church
• Welcome to St. Matthew’s UMC
• Worship Schedule
• St. Matthew’s History

These tags are very, very important to ranking well in the search engines.  They’re also the default text when someone bookmarks a page.  I would recommend my usual “church name - location - page”.  In your case, the title of your “history” page would be something like:

St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church - Fayetteville, NC - History

Follow the same idea for all of your other pages.

It doesn’t seem that you use any H1 tags on your site (though you use some H2s).  These are very important as well.  Whatever the main text of your page is up at the top (like “Weekly Sunday Schedule”), it should be enclosed in H1 tags.  You can use CSS to make the text look any way that you want, but Google is looking for those specific tags.

The HTML code on your pages isn’t too bad.  I would lose some of the meta keywords (search engines ignore them) as they’re just wasting space.  Otherwise, things look good there.

Conclusion

The site could use a few graphic tweaks to make it seem a bit more current.  I see a church website that looks stuck in the past, and I associate that with a church that is stuck in the past.  You don’t want that.

To summarize, here is what you should look at doing:

• Break a lot of the content out of the home page and build separate pages with it.
• Get rid of unncessary items like the visitor counter and the weather box at the bottom.
• Link internally as much as possible, especially on pages like the “Visitors Welcome Information”
• Clean up your title tags
• Start using H1 tags

That’s really about it.  It doesn’t sound like much, but reworking that front page will be quite a job.  Have fun!

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: FUMC Siloam Springs

Church: First UMC - Siloam Springs, AR
URL: http://www.fumcss.com/

Initial thoughts

For the second site in a row, the first thing I see when I open the page is a big picture of the church building. I think this keeps happening because too many people consider their facility to be their “church”. Nope. The people inside are the church, so the people should be the first thing I see on your site.

The quick links next to the church photo are great. We’ll explore those in a minute.

The “Breaking Bread Menu” is about a month out of date. That never looks good.

The “Contact Us” is always good to have on the home page.

The page title is awful - “www.fumcss.com”? That should be more people friendly. We’ll get into that in the Search Engine Optimization section.

Browsing around

So, I went into “When & Where”. This is a great page! It’s easy to read and has great information. Also, this is a fine place for a picture of your building. I want to know about your worship services, so there’s a photo of the inside of the sanctuary - perfect! My only complaint is the lack of links. Each of your services should be linked to a page with more info about them.

I just noticed that URL didn’t change. I realized that you’ve masked your own over the GBGM URL. While I can see the reasons for doing that, it makes things much worse for your end users. What if I want to send my wife a link to a specifc page? I can’t, because every URL is the same…

Next, I went back to the home page to see “What to Expect”. It’s a nice page, but it seems focused on talking about how great the church is, rather than preparing me to feel comfortable. I’d rather know what style of worship I’m getting into, what kind of clothes to wear — stuff like that. It’s great that I’ll “probably notice people caring for one another in various ways”, but that text doesn’t mean a thing until I see it happen first-hand.

The “FAQ” linked from the home page is great. Again, though, it simply needs more links.

Next up I went to the Staff page. Not much there. At the very least I expected some photos. As I’ve told others, I suggest creating a separate page for each staff member so that you can link to their page whenever you mention them. This section needs a lot of beefing up.

The “map” link at the top was a surprise - it just took me off to MapQuest! I thought the “When & Where” page was great, with some specific directions in there. Link to that page (or even a dedicated “directions” page) and only give the MapQuest link at the end if they still need more help.

Search engine optimization

The first thing you need to do here is fix your URL. While I think having the GBGM URL show up is kind of ugly, it certainly beats hiding it the whole time. Hiding means I can’t give a link to anyone else, I can’t bookmark a specific page and the search engines will have a hard time indexing your content.

As I mentioned at the top, the title tags are awful. However, you can’t do much about that until you fix the URLs.

You use H1 tags very well.

As I’ve said before, you need to add a whole lot more internal links. To copy from the previous review I did — “As a general rule, link everything you can. If you mention a building, link to the page with details on that building. If you mention a staff member, link to their page. If you mention a ministry, link to the page with more info about that ministry.”

The code on each page is very strange. Each line of code is separated by about 10 blank lines. If nothing else, that’s making your pages a big larger and slower to download. It appears to be pretty well-written code, but just spaced very oddly.

Conclusion

This site is off to a good start and I have just a few suggstions:

• Fix the URL / masking thing.
• The email link on the top of the homepage is broken. It appears you forgot the “mailto:” part of it.
• Get rid of the church building on the home page.
• The “search” box never works. I couldn’t get it to do anything in either Firefox or Internet Explorer.
• Update/Remove the “Breaking Bread Menu”.
• Add more internal links everywhere.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Marshallton UMC

Church: Marshallton UMC - West Chester, PA
URL: http://www.marshalltonchurch.org/

Initial thoughts

The first thing I see when I open the page is a big picture of the church building. No no no no no. Having your church building in some places on your site is fine, but not as the main picture on your home page. The church is the people, not the building. That should be some bright smiling faces, not an emotionless stone building.

The contact info on the top left is great!

I don’t see any worship info on the front page, but there is a very obvious link to it at the top, so that’s good.

I’m not sure the VBS info needs to be that high on the page, especially with that much text. That info is much higher up than your welcome text.

I don’t intend to be rude here, but does anyone care about the “National/International Church News”? I know the ministers at our church would, but very few members of the congreation would. That looks like something that someone added after they thought “Well, we can do this so I guess we should do this”. If you want that on the site at all, put it away in a sub-page somewhere.

Browsing around

The first place I went was the worship section. I figured I could get there by clicking on the word “Worship”. Nope. Instead, I got a lecture about how I need to hold my mouse over the desired topic, wait a second for the drop-down menu to appear, then click the sub-item. What? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard. This is a great example of “how to get someone to leave your site in 30 seconds or less”. I understand that the content really lives in those sub-menus, and that’s fine. If I click on the main button, it should take me to a page with a list of the sub-items (in this case, “worship schedule” and “music”).

This leads to a bigger problem — what if I don’t have JavaScript enabled? Statistics show that up to 10% of users don’t have JavaScript enabled (usually due to security concerns), so what about those folks? Well, they’ll just go back to Google and try to find another church in the area.

So now I’m on the “Worship” page, and it’s a very nice little page. The text is broken into appropriate-sized paragraphs, bolded when necessary, with a nice photo of the praise band. My only suggestion here would be to link to other pages within that text. For example, you mention the “nursery” in the “education wing”. Link both of those to other pages on your site with more info.

From here I tried to get back to you home page, but it took me a minute to find the link. I expected the logo in the corner to take me there, so you might want to link that up.

Next I went to the “Schedule & Events” page. It’s a decent page, and it shows that the site is kept up-to-date. However, it also needs a bit more internal linking. When you say “Sunday School”, give me a link with more info. Same with “Traditional Service”, “Contemporary Service” and things like that.

Next I thought I’d check out the staff. Again, it makes no sense to me that I can’t click on the main “Our Pastor & Staff” link. In this case, that page should list all of your staff members (maybe with a photo next to each one), with each one linked to their individual page.

I went in to Rev. Widmer’s page to see what it was like. I’m glad there is a photo there of him, and the short bio is nice. However, where is his contact info? E-mail? Phone? Anything?

Search engine optimization

One of the big killers for search engine optimation on this site is the JavaScript-or-die menu. That makes it very hard for search engines to find all of your pages.

Your title tag isn’t bad, but it never changes. It should change to reflect each page. Iwould keep it about the same and just add the page name at the end, like “Marshallton United Methodist Church, West Chester, Pennsylvania - Sunday School”.

You use H1 tags on each page, which is great. However, you should try to improve them. For example, on Rev. Widmer’s page the main tag is “Our Pastor”. You’d be much better of making the tag “Rev. Scott Widmer”.

You need to add much more internal linking. To copy from the previous review I did — “As a general rule, link everything you can. If you mention a building, link to the page with details on that building. If you mention a staff member, link to their page. If you mention a ministry, link to the page with more info about that ministry.”

Conclusion

You’ve got a nice looking site on your hands. It’s clean and easy to read, but it just has a few glaring issues to fix.

First, you need to fix the JavaScript menu issues ASAP. Fortunately, this is easy. The root page for each menu seems to be “default.htm”, “default2.htm”, “default3.htm”, etc. Just modify those pages to show which pages can be found in that menu. That will help the search engines, that will help your users that don’t have JavaScript enabled and that’ll help people like me that assume that they can be clicked.

Some other things to work on:

• Get rid of the church building on the home page.
• Create a “facility” section and put up all kinds of photos of your building.
• Get rid of the “National/International Church News” on the home page.
• Make the logo in the top-left corner of the page link back to the home page.
• Tweak your title tags.
• Modify some of your H1 tags.
• Add more internal links everywhere.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Mt. Healthy UMC

Church: Mt. Healthy UMC - Cincinnati, OH
URL: http://www.mthealthyumc.org/

Initial thoughts

I don’t tend to comment on graphics much, but I can’t say I’m a fan of the background. When I looked at the page, that’s the first thing that my eyes were drawn to — and that’s not a good thing to have happen.

Once I got past that, I found myself very pleased with the content available. Location, contact info and service info are all right there. However, while the Contemporary Service is linked to a page for more info (a whole separate site, in fact), the Traditional Service isn’t. Why not? I have no idea what your service is like, what to wear, etc. I might not even be Methodist, which means I have NO clue what that service might be like. I also like the fact that the location of both services is listed, and those locations are linked to a page with more info.

As I moved down the page, I came to the “Highway 127 Express”. I have no idea what that means, but I guess I don’t need to know. I love that it shows some upcoming events right there, as that shows me that not only is it an active church, but they keep their site up to date. I found it strange that the building locations weren’t linked in here, when they were just a few inches above. It might seem redundant to link them again, but a visitor might not have seen the links above.

Down at the bottom of the home page is some nice contact info. I like that the e-mail link takes me to a form, rather than just a mailto: link. Very nice.

Browsing around

I saw that the site uses a JavaScript menu, so I thought I’d try to break it. I disabled JS on my browser to see what would happen. I was plesantly surprised to see that the root links still appeared (though very hard to read), and each of them brought me to a page where I could get to the content below.

I went into [Updates] –> [News & Coming Events]. This page is formatted very strange, with a big blank gap above the calendar. I don’t see any reason for the “recent updates” to be there, nor the Cross & Flame. They’re nice to have on the front, but they’re just eating up real estate here.

I click on a random event in the list at the top of the page (”Saturday Evening Service”) and was told to “check mthealthumc.org to find out what is happening each week”. Based on that, I assume this data is published somewhere else as well. Still, that’s a pretty dumb message for it to tell me. I’m already on the site - tell me about the service.

I had noticed on the front page there was a link to get directions to the church, so I went there. Um… This page doesn’t help me a bit. It’s just a static image of a Google Map, zoomed in pretty tight on the church. It also tells me “It’s now about half past two” and “This page has been up and running since September 6th, 2001″. I’m on a computer so I already know what time it is, and I don’t really care how long the page has been up. If anything, that’s a bad thing to put there because it tells me that this page has been up for more than five years and still doesn’t work right.

There’s a few things that could greatly improve this page:

1. Put some actual directions on in, in plain text. “If you’re coming east on Route 66, take exit 27g and turn right…”. Do that for people coming from a variety of directions.
2. Make that Google Map a real Google Map. They provide free tools to make that a real map and not just a picture of one. I was clicking all over it trying to do something.
3. Provide images from a series of maps. I’ve seen churches show an image of a map zoomed way out with a red X on their church. Then another one zoomed a bit closer. Then another one a bit closer. Etc, etc.

Ideally, you should do #1 and then either #2 or #3 — no need for both. Given that this page is linked on your home page (which is a great idea), it should provide some better content.

I went to the staff page next. I like that you created separate pages for some of your staff members, but why not for your Pastor? It seems very strange that you have a page dedicated to your custodian, but just a simple e-mail link for your pastor… Again, the “recent updates” and the Cross & Flame could probably go.

Next I went to “Sunday’s Bulletin” under the [Updates] menu. This page is done well. You clearly label each link as a PDF, then provide a link to download Acrobat Reader. The one thing I would change is where it says “this week’s…” to the date. So many churches leave things out of date, I’m not sure what “this week” necessarily means.

Search engine optimization

There are a number of things that can be done to improve the SEO on this site.

First, straighten out the domain name. Everything should land on your main URL, not on 50webs.com. You can buy web hosting for about $5/month, so it shouldn’t be a big deal.

I looked at your source code and was fairly pleased. You’ve done a nice job of moving the CSS and JavaScript to external files, which can help quite a bit.

It appears that you don’t use any H1 tags on the site. This is critical. The main focus of each page should be in an H1 tag near the top of the page. You can style the tag using CSS any way you want, but Google is still going to look for the tag.

Your title tags are decent. I’ve certainly seen much worse, but they could be improved a bit. First, make them consistent. Going through your “groups” we have:

• Adult programs at Mt. Healthy UMC
• Mt. Healthy UMC Youth!
• Children’s Programs at Mt. Healthy UMC
• Mt. Healthy UMC for Women
• Men at Mt. Healthy UMC

Again, none of those are too bad, but they could all be better. I would suggest my normal “Church name - ministry name - location”. In your case, it would be “Mt. Healthy UMC - Childrens Programs - Mt. Healthy, OH”.

Your internal linking could be improved. This would not only benefit the search engines, but would help your users quite a bit. A good example is the music page. At the bottom you mention Cheryl Raine. In the staff section she has her own page. Her name at the bottom of the music page should link to her staff page.

As a general rule, link everything you can. If you mention a building, link to the page with details on that building. If you mention a staff member, link to their page. If you mention a ministry, link to the page with more info about that ministry.

Conclusion

All in all it’s a very good site. The most important things are that people will see that you are an active church, and people can get to the information they need with relatively few clicks.

That being said, here is a summary of the things you should look at changing in the near future:

• Build a page for your traditional service and link to it whenever you mention that service.
• Build a page for your pastor and link to it when you mention his name.
• Improve the directions page.
• Resolve your domain name.
• Tweak your title tags
• Add H1 tags to each page.
• Remove the “recent updates”, Cross & Flame and “this page has been up and running…” from every page that has them. (You can leave the Cross & Flame on the home page, of course)
• The other minor things I’ve mentioned above.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: Annandale UMC

Church: Annandale UMC - Annandale, VA
URL: http://www.annandale-umc.org/

A friend of mine moved up to Annandale about three years ago to take a job as their Director of Music Ministries, and it appears he’s still there. I thought I’d check out the site to see how it was doing and was rather surprised to see that it looked exactly the same as it did three years ago. Hopefully they can use some suggestions from this article to make some much needed improvements.

Initial thoughts

The first thing I noticed was the vast amount of text on the home page. While I’m a big believer in text over graphics, I just didn’t have any clue where to start. My eyes drifted down to “PUTTING GOD’S HOUSE IN ORDER”, which at least showed me that the site was still being maintained. I also noticed that this page (and every other page) is completely missing their “title” tag. While I usually have suggestions for churches on how to improve their title, this is the first one I’ve seen in a while that doesn’t have one at all. As a result, it looks funny in my taskbar, a standard bookmark is useless, and they’re no doubt buried in the search engines.

At the bottom of the home page are a bunch of annoucements, which surprisingly pop up as PDF files. Don’t do that! Always label them as PDFs with a little icon or something. Really, it’s best to pull them out of PDF and post them as HTML, but if you must do PDF, please label them as such. I thought this was funny — “You need Acrobat Reader to open the PDF file and can download that free from the Internet“. In other words, if you need it go find it yourself!

Finally, at the very bottom, is a hit counter. How nice. Why is it there? Those were cool in the mid-90s, but look around - no one else displays them. Having a robust analytics tool is quite important for any site, but this is neither robust or important. In this case, it looks rather pitiful. While 50,000 visitors looks nice, it’s not so good when you realize that’s a total since 2001. It comes out to about 25 visits a day. For a church that size, I’d be hiding that number.

I did appreciate the fact that the church address and phone number were very easily found, as well as a nice link to the important info — “Directions”, “Our Sunday Worship Services” and “Contact Us”. Let’s check those out.

Browsing around

The directions page is pretty well done. I had a hard time figuring out where they were in the first map, but I like that they include text directions from a number of different directions.

Next, I went to the “Our Sunday Worship Services” page. It gives the necessary info (including scripture for the next few weeks), but is lacking a few things. For one, where is the Sanctuary? It seems to be a fairly large church, so I’m not sure I’d know where to park. Worse yet, they mention “Hughes Hall” but give no link for more info on that. I suppose it’s at the church, but I don’t know that for sure. If it is, is it attached to the main building? I have no idea.

Then I tried out the “Contact Us” page. Whoops. It’s not a page - just an e-mail link. Don’t surprise me like that. I expected a contact form, or a list of staff members or something like that. Oddly enough, they show the church e-mail address below the menu on the left side, but that’s not linked.

Since my buddy Pat is still doing music up there, I thought I’d go to the “Music Ministries” page. The resulting page is very boring, but useful - I get links to their three main areas (adult, youth, children) as well as links to some recent pictures. I would think a few sentences worth of text and maybe a photo would help, but I appreciate the fact that the page is uncluttered.

Off we go to “Adult Emsembles”. This page lists the three choirs, with information on when they perform and when they rehearse. Not bad. However, each of them says “Director: Pat Vaughn”, with no other info. Why not a link to a page about Pat with a photo, e-mail and phone number. A short bio would be nice too, but I know it can be like pulling teeth to get those from some people. Still, at least give me a link with some info about him.

I just noticed a link called “About This Site” on the left. I don’t see those very often, but a glimpse inside tells me why.

• This page is designed to be viewed on monitors either using 800×600 pixel….
  • No no no no no. Never do that. You need to be really cocky to think that someone is going to change their resolution just to view your site. You might get the occasional person to do it, but not many.
• In order to use the left-side navigation bar you must have the browser window set to “full screen”
  • No I don’t. It’s not, and it works fine. However, if you know there is a problem for people with less than “full screen” set, you need to fix the problem on YOUR end, not mine.
• This site uses frames, but we’ve tried to keep it as user-friendly as possible, blah blah blah.
  • I like the way they worded that. “This site uses frames, BUT we’ve tried to keep it user-friendly”. They know that frames are a bad idea, they just don’t have the desire to change it.
• If you find for some reason that you cannot use the navigation bar, at the bottom of the main page there are links to all of the “parent” pages. To move from “parent” page to “parent” page you will have to use your browser’s “back” button to return to the main page.
  • What? I pretty much know what they’re trying to say, and if you’re reading this site then you probably do too. However, I’d guess at least 50% of their visitors would have no idea what that junk says.
• The AUMC site contains some links to outside Web sites. When these are clicked, a separate browser window will open for them.
  
  • Why? That just breaks their back button. If a user wants it in a new window, let them open it in a new window. If not, don’t.

So that was a fun page. The rest of the site pretty much follows suit. Fairly easy navigation, a LOT of text, and not many internal links within the text. For example, here is part of a paragraph from “About AUMC” –> “Our Congregation”.

To this end, our Bread of life Program is designed to attract and welcome new members and visitors. Our Institute for Christian Growth and Servanthood offers study tours, seminars, and educational opportunities. Mission and service opportunities abound. We participate in Volunteers In Missions (VIM) programs, Appalachia Service Project (ASP) and other mission programs. Disciple Bible is offered as are other Bible study opportunities. Our newly rebuilt Wright Hall enables us to sponsor basketball clinics, exercise programs, and fellowship activities; the newly opened Child Care Center provides day care for 55 children.

No where in there is a link to any more info about any of the programs mentioned. Let’s see that same bit of text, but this time I’ll bold the words that I think should be linked somewhere with more info.

To this end, our Bread of life Program is designed to attract and welcome new members and visitors. Our Institute for Christian Growth and Servanthood offers study tours, seminars, and educational opportunities. Mission and service opportunities abound. We participate in Volunteers In Missions (VIM) programs, Appalachia Service Project (ASP) and other mission programs. Disciple Bible is offered as are other Bible study opportunities. Our newly rebuilt Wright Hall enables us to sponsor basketball clinics, exercise programs, and fellowship activities; the newly opened Child Care Center provides day care for 55 children.

This same idea should be implemented throughout the entire site. Some of those pages already exist and others would need to be built.

Search engine optimization

We’ll start with the good stuff:

• Solid PageRank (4).
• Lots of text-based links (rather than images)
• That’s about it.

So what needs to change?

• First, lose the frames. That will be a huge undertaking, but it needs to be done.
• Once that’s done, start adding title tags to each page. I would suggest my standard “church name - location - page” style. For example, the title tag on the Music Ministries page would be:
  • Annadale United Methodist Church - Annandale, VA - Music Ministries
• Lose the frames
• Get rid of the font tags. I’m pleased that they use H1 tags on most pages, but flavor them with CSS rather than font tags. This will make the pages much lighter.
• Lose the frames.
• Better internal linking. In most cases, if I search for the name of a church staff member in Google, their staff page should come up first. This is due to there being so many links on the site that point back to it. Every time you mention a staff member you should link to their page. Every time you mention a building, link to its page. Every time you mention a ministry, link to its page.
• Lose the frames

Conclusion

I have to hope that they were looking at re-doing the site by this point anyhow, so maybe this info will be of some value. If I were digging in and had to simply repair this site, rather than re-build from scratch, I would:

• Lose the frames. Seriously. I’ve already given a bunch of reasons why they need to go (Title tags, SEO, etc), but here’s another — I can’t link anyone to a specific page on the site! If I saw something cool on the children’s page that I wanted to send to my wife, I’d copy and paste the link and send it. However, every link is simply a link to the homepage because of the frames.
• Work on the rest of my SEO suggestions.
• Consolidate the menu. I don’t have a definite rule on how many items should be in a top-level menu, but I’m sure it’s less than the 27 that are there now. Somewhere around 10 should be the ceiling; 5 might be better. One called “programs” or “ministries” will take care of half of it. Oddly enough, there already is an “Our Ministries” page, but most of the links are duplicated right below it. Working out a good menu structure can take some real planning. Look at how other churches break it down and then try to figure out how your pages would fit into that scheme.
• Add some photos of your church. No, not the building — the people. The front page needs to have a smiling face or two on it. Don’t overdo it, but a little spice would be nice.
  • Yes, of course the new “facility” section certainly can have pictures of the building on it. That’s what the facility is. Just remember that the “church” is nothing but the people inside.

Any other suggestions for them or thoughts about what I’ve said? Leave them in the comments below.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

Site Review: FUMC Dothan

Church: First Untied Methodist Church - Dothan, Alabama
URL: http://www.fumcdothan.org/

I feel I should offer a disclaimer on this site before we start. I worked at this church for a few years (2002-2004) and did their website. It was decent at the time, but nothing too great. I had used TYPO3 to power the site, which had its good and bad points. Anyhow, they’ve finally updated their site and I see a number of things that could be easily tweaked to improve it, so here we go…

Initial thoughts

My first thought wasn’t too bad. I love that there are smiling faces on the front - that’s always good. I don’t care for the color scheme, but I’m not a designer so I probably shouldn’t get into that very much. We’ll focus on content/SEO and let them figure out the best colors.

Some other things are done very well on the front. The Sunday worship schedule is very easy to find. My only complaint about that is that only “The Bridge” is linked to anything. Why isn’t “Communion in the Chapel” or “Sanctuary Services” linked anywhere? I want to know what their Sanctuary Services are like, and a link there would make sense.

I also really like the fact that the address and phone is on every page, but it’s in white text on a yellow background, which makes it nearly impossible to read.

Browsing around

So, let’s hit the “News and Events” to see what’s new. Not much, apparently. This is a large church (around 2500 members, I think), so this page should be packed. Instead I see simply a “church directories coming soon” announcement (no link for more info) and an animated gif with an “under construction” truck. That scared me. I haven’t seen cheesy “under construction” gifs in a while, so at this point I became concerned about the rest of the site.

To the rest of you out there - don’t do that! If you have content, build a page and put it up. If not, don’t.

I tried the “weekly church calendar” on the site, but it was empty. Next I tried the newsletter and got some real content. This is a pretty well done page. The only thing here is that the newsletters are listed and linked, but not clearly identified as PDFs (that info is way at the bottom). At the very least, give me a little icon or something so I know what I’m clicking. I hate to be surprised by a PDF…

Next I went into “ministries & outreach”. All in all, not a bad page. One thing that could be changed was the link at the bottom “for more information”. I love that the info is there, but I hate that it doesn’t link to a page with more info about “Rev. David Hendrix”. Every staff member should have a page devoted to them so that you can just refer people to that page rather than trying to give all of their info every time.

I wanted to check out the youth page since I used to be involved with their youth department, but I couldn’t find it. Later I found it tucked under “christian education”. Huh? Why on earth is it there?

Speaking of strange menu titles, I find all of them to be rather Christianese. I’ll admit that it can be difficult to categorize the areas of a church without Christian lingo, but these aren’t good. I try (though often fail) to avoid using the word “ministries” in a top level menu, and having “christian education” up there just isn’t good.

While we’re up there, I fail to understand why the “Click logo for home” is necessary. Most people know that already. If you’re concerned that they don’t, then just change that text to “home” and have it link home. Very rarely should you instruct users to click elsewhere to get something done. If you need to link them somewhere, then just link them there. Don’t tell them “click over there to get to x” - just be a little redundant and provide two links.

Anyhow, we’re still on the “ministries & outreach” page. I thought I’d check out the “Community Outreach” page. Dead link. Same with a few others on that page. If the pages aren’t ready yet, then don’t build the links. If it was just some typos, then it’s understandable - there are always some bugs on a new site.

At this point, I decided to head back to the home page again. I love churches that have a “first time visitor info” link on the front, so I followed it. The resulting page was pretty good. The text at the beginning starts with “We want to personally welcome you…”, which I always find humerous. You didn’t “personally” welcome me at all. In fact, you won’t even know I visited the site until you look at your site logs later. That aside, it is a friendly touch to have.

The list of services is nice. I just noticed that they no longer have a “facility” section on the site. For large churches (such as this), I always recommend that. Telling a first time visitor that the service is in the “Fellowship Hall” means nothing. Which side of the church is that on? Where should I park?

Below that are directions/parking info, consise and well-done.

I also like the link for nursery info, so I followed it. The nursery page is good, but it highlights some of the shortcomings mentioned above:

• I should contact Sheri Downey. Great. Who is she? Give me a link to a page with photo and e-mail, please.
• Where is the nursery? Tell me what building it’s in, then give me a link for more info about that building.

Search engine optimization

This church is fortunate to be in a small town like Dothan. Even with terrible SEO, they’ll still rank well because of the lack of “competition”. That being said, there is a lot to improve.

Let’s start with the mighty “title” tag. This can be one of the most important parts of a page. The home page tag is “Welcome To First United Methodist Church of Dothan”. ALL of the rest are “First United Methodist Church of Dothan”. A few things to consider:

• Never use the title to talk to people. “Welcome” should saved for the page.
• Every page of your site should have a slightly different title tag.
• The fact that the church name and city were in there already is great.

I suggest a tag like this:

Church name - location - page info

In their case, it would look something like this:

First United Methodist Church - Dothan, AL - Music Ministries

Next we have the common “www” problem. The issue here is that they don’t specify between using www.fumcdothan.org or simply fumcdothan.org (no www). This post will help with that problem.

Next are the H1 tags. Every page should have one. This tells the search engines (and your users) what the page is about. This is often very similar (or identical) to the last section of your title tag for that page. Having the page name buried in an image is fine, but even if you do that you need to have it in an H1 tag at the top of the page.

A few things done well are the internal links and the page URLs. The page URLs are very descriptive and the links on the site are mostly text-based and informative about the destination. That helps quite a bit in the search results.

Conclusion

It’s a good start. I’m going to assume it just went live and the bugs are still being worked out. Here’s what I see as some of the things that need to get some attention:

• Put some text on the home page (at least a little bit) with some info about the church. Love the pics, though!
• Get rid of the “click logo for home” link on most pages.
• Fix the title tags.
• Add H1 tags.
• Fix the “news and events” page as described above.
• Fix the links on the “ministries & outreach” page.
• The home page has a 1″ gap at the top on FireFox, and the logo on the home page is a bit squished on both FireFox and IE.
• Fix the www vs. non-www issue.
• Build individual staff pages. Keep the main staff listing, but have each one link to the specific staff member. Then, have links around the site simply link to that staff member’s detail page rather than putting out all of the info all over the place.
• Build some facility pages to help guests figure out where they need to go.
• Link the worship info items on the front page to details about each service.
• Just noticed that “What Do We Believe?” doesn’t work..

That’s probably enough for now. I should also mention that as far as I know, this church doesn’t have a full-time webmaster. This work is done by directors that have other full-time ministries to attend to, so keeping up with it can be understanably difficult. That being said, the checklist I just provided could probably be knocked out in about a day and would certainly make a big difference.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »