Church Website Help

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The “Breaking Bread Menu” is about a month out of date.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 »

Site Review: Hope Works

Church: Hope Works - Fort Worth, Texas
URL: http://www.hopeworks.us/

Initial thoughts

The first thing I did was to put the church name and location at the top of this post. The church name was easy, but it took a minute to find the location — it’s not on the homepage at all! Both from a useability and SEO standpoint, that info should be on every page. At the very least, I’d put the full info in the footer of every page and the city/state at the end of each title tag.

Another thing missing from the home page is worship info. However, it has a nice link that’s easy to spot. Clicking the link gives me some basic info, but it’s a bit perplexing. Here’s a page with the name the building they’re in (Botanic Gardens Indoor Theater) and map, but no address! If I’m not familiar with the town, I’ll need more info than what is provided there. In my case (and for many others, I’m sure), I’d just plug the address into my GPS or else use MapQuest to give me directions.

Browsing around

So I checked out the “Contact Us” page to find the address. This page is done well. I like the info about each pastor, which includes both a photo and bio for each of them. Having both of those pieces in place helps me feel like I know them just a tiny bit before I ever visit the church.

I decided to head back to the home page so I clicked “BACK HOME” at the top. Click. Click. Click. Oops. Not a link. Fortuantely, you’ve got one in the side menu.

I headed out to the forums next, as that’s a feature that most churches don’t do well (or often don’t do at all). In your case, you seem to have some activity on there, which is great. Using phpBB as your software is a fine choice. I’m more of a vBulletin fan, but you saved $160 so I can’t fault you there. The only thing I’d suggest is to get rid of a few forums for now. Despite having 71 posts on there, many of them are empty. The best way is typically to start with a few forums until they’re busting at the seams, then slowly expand out. As you build out the new forums, you can move the relevant posts from the other forums and pre-populate them a bit. Still, though, you’ve done a nice job.

Now, back to the home page. Let’s see. Uh. No link. I’ll just type it in, I guess…

I thought “get to know us” might be neat, but it was just another link to the “contact us” page. Why have both links so close to each other?

I like the idea of a blog on the front. I would suggest maybe a bit of general “welcome” text, but not much. Just something like “we’re a contemporary church in Fort Worth, Texas and we’d love you to come visit. If you have questions, please call us at xxx-xxx-xxxx or e-mail, blah blah”.

I found myself jumping between a handful of themes. I guess maybe three of them - the front page, the other pages and the forum. I can understand the forum being different, but why the drastic change from the front page to the others?

Search engine optimization

You’ve got a few things you can do to help you rank better in the search engines.  Using the simple “Fort Worth church” query, you’re not in the first 100 results.

Titles - Just by nature of using a blog platform, your page titles aren’t too bad, but could be improved.  At the very least, I’d get “Fort Worth”, or “Fort Worth, TX” in there somewhere.

WWW - I noticed that as I browse around the site, it switches back and forth quite a bit between “www.hopeworks.us” and simply “hopeworks.us” (no www).  Those should be more consistent.  In fact, you should choose one and force all traffic from the other to use it.  It can be transparent to the user, but will help quite a bit.  This post has more info on how to do that.

Beyond that, things are pretty good.  WordPress does a nice job.

Conclusion

All in all, you’ve got a pretty solid site.  To summarize, here are the things I would work on:

• Get me back to the home page — fix the link at the top of the red template and add a link somewhere on the top of the forum.
• Make the theme more consistent.  At the very least get the front page and internal pages looking more similar.
• Combine a few of your extra forums, at least temporarily.  That should help your growth.
• Put your full contact info (address, phone, e-mail) in the footer of every page.
• Put more info on the “Location & Services” page.  At least give the address.  Better yet, put in a box for people to generate directions like I did here a while back.

Nice work!

Posted in Site Reviews | |
No Comments »

How does PageRank work, really?

I’ve read a lot of comments over the last few weeks with wild theories about how PageRank works.  Some things I’ve heard:

• appropriate content
• good design
• don’t use flash
• get incoming links
• good meta tags

Four of those are completely wrong.  One is right — incoming links.  When calculating PageRank, all that matters are the links coming into your site.

Understand, of course, that hundreds of other things can affect your ranking in Google, including those items listed above.  However, for PageRank it’s just simple math.

Here is the formula Google used when PageRank first came out.  The currently formula is possibly a bit different, but certainly quite similar:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

Let’s break it down:

PR(A) — The PageRank of your site

(1-d) — d is the “dampening factor”, typically 0.85

+ d(PR(t1)/C(t1)  — PR(t1) is the PR of a site linking to you.  That PageRank is divided by the number of outgoing links on that page so that each link from that page gets an equal slice of the PageRank.

PR(tn)/C(tn) — Same idea as the last one, just showing us that it keeps adding the totals from every page that is linking to you, the multiplies that total by d, the dampening factor.

The dampening factor serves two purposes.  First, it makes sure that every page has some PageRank, even if there are no links coming in to it.  In that case, the PageRank is simply (1-d), or 0.15.

The second reason is so you couldn’t get a page up to a certain level and then run single links off of it to other pages and have them all instantly at the same high level.

It’s also important to note that the number calculated here is not the same as the 0-10 number that you see in the Google toolbar.  That number is based on this one.

The 0-10 number in the toolbar is set on a logarithmic scale.  Google won’t say what the scale is, but most people figure it’s around 5.  This means you need five times as  much PageRank to move up to each new level.  This also means that there are 1/5 as many sites at each higher level.

Here’s the bottom line.  PageRank is based on three things and three things only:

1. The number of links coming into your site
2. The PageRank of the links coming into your site
3. The number of links on the pages of the links coming into your site.

That’s it!  Nothing else goes into it.  Again, though, hundreds of things go into determining your exact ranking position, but nothing else goes into your PageRank calculation.

Posted in Search Engines | |
2 Comments »

Two small SEO tips

I just realized I’ve forgotten to mention two small tips for helping your site rank better in the search engines.

The first is a very common one, and over time could help a little bit. This is to have all of your “yoursite.com” traffic redirect to “www.yoursite.com”. This will help focus the pagerank and ratings onto one page instead of two separate (but identical) pages. Making this happen for you entire site is a very simple process. As I mentioned in a different topic, you’ll need to make a small modification to your .htaccess file.

If you don’t know what that file is, look in the root directory of your website (usually “public_html” or something like that). Assuming you’re on a Linux server (if you don’t know, then you probably are), there should be a file in there named “.htaccess”. If there’s not, simply create a blank file and give it that name. The body of the file needs three simple lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If there is already some text in your .htaccess file, just put those last two lines at the bottom of the file (it should already have “RewriteEngine On” at the top.

That’s it! Try it out. Type in yoursite.com and it should instantly redirect to www.yoursite.com. This will work for all sub-pages as well. If you type in yoursite.com/youthministry, it will automatically redirect to www.yoursite.com/youthministry.

The second tip is much easier, but less likely to help. Extend your domain registration by at least 4 or 5 years. I always recommend you extend it WAY out (10 years or more), simply so you make sure you don’t lose the name. However, there are thoughts that having a longer period will help you rank slightly better. The reason? Spammers pick up names for a year at a time, so a site that has already extended for a large number of years will seem more legitimate. Again, this will make just a tiny difference (if any), but it’s good to do for other reasons anyhow so you might as well do it.

Google and Yahoo both say that there are “hundreds” of things that help determine how a site ranks for a particular phrase, so this is likely one tiny piece of that puzzle.

Mickey

Posted in Search Engines | |
3 Comments »

Johnson Ferry Baptist shows how NOT to change to a new design.

First, check out their new site. It’s beautiful. It’s obvious they spent a long time planning the look and feel of it and they did a great job. Then they just chucked it up there without a care in the world about their exisiting pages.

One of the big keys to success for a church website, in my opinion, is how well they rank in the search engines. If someone is looking for a church in your area, you want them to find your church. Simple enough.

JF used to rank pretty well for a lot of terms. With the new design, they’ve changed all of their page names and now all of those old pages in Google are worthless. If you search Google for site:jfbc.org, you’ll get a list of all of their old pages. 99% of them are dead links.

Now, while you should try to avoid changing the names of your pages, sometimes you have good reasons. However, they’ve gone from relatively descriptive page names to horribly cryptics ones. For example, here is the old address to their directions page:

http://www.jfbc.org/about/directions.aspx

and here is the new one:

http://www.johnsonferry.org/Directions/tabid/156/Default.aspx

If you’re gonna make a change that drastic, at least make it a good change.

Ok, so the change has been made and there’s no going back. Now what? It’s simple - put in some 301 redirects. The details on how to do that can vary quite a bit from server to server, but here’s a page to get you started.

What is a 301 redirect, you ask? It’s a way to direct visitors to the new page on your site, but also to tell the search engines that the page has moved and to update their records. There are other ways to do a redirect, but a 301 will do the best job of getting your items in Google updated to their new address.

So how bad has this hurt JFBC? It’s hard to say since I obviously don’t have access to their stats, but I’d guess it’s quite a lot. Looking on Google (again, use the “site:” command), here’s how many pages I see:

mtbethel.org (site down the road where I used to work) - 1,840 pages
rumc.com (another local church) - 426 pages
jfbc.org - 288 pages (99% of which are dead links now)
johnsonferry.org - 17 pages. Ouch!

The other issue they’ll have is that of trust and time. One of the biggest factors Google uses lately is the age of site and how much trust it has (usually in the form of links from other sites). A proper 301 redirect will help transfer trust, but you can never transfer time. Even if they make the necessary changes, they’re gonna be hurting in Google for a while.

One last thing I suggest they do (and you should to), is to point all of their “johnsonferry.org” traffic to “www.johnsonferry.org”. This will help the site rank better in Google - not very much, but every little bit helps. To do that, they’d simply need to open up their .htaccess file (like they did for the 301 redirect) and add these three lines:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^johnsonferry.org$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.johnsonferry.org/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s about it. I’ll be interesting to see if they try to do anything to help their ranking, or if they just ride it out for a while and see what happens.

Mickey

Posted in Site Reviews | |
1 Comment »

Site Review: FUMC Birmingham

Church: First United Methodist - Birmingham, Michigan
URL: http://www.fumcbirmingham.org/

Initial thoughts

Your home page is laid out very well. The menu on the left is a bit hard to read with the cross & flame behind it, but isn’t too bad. I know the UMC can be picky about how the cross and flame are used (though they aren’t known to complain about it), so I’d check and make sure it’s ok with them.

A few things that you’ve done especially well:

• Worship times are front and center
• Purpose is stated clearly
• The welcome message is easy to read (not big Christianese words)
• The welcome message is well-linked to appropriate areas of the site

A search box on the front would be nice, but it’s got an obvious link in the menu so it’s not a big deal.

Browsing around

One of the first links in your welcome message is for “Sunday morning worship”, so I went there. Aside from a weird formatting bug in FireFox (there is about 1″ of solid blue between the side menu and the content), it’s a great page. The stained glass doesn’t do much for me (maybe some people worshipping instead?), but you again did a great job of providing adequate content with appropriate links.

Since I’ve been a youth guy at times, I thought I’d check out the youth section. The first thing I noticed is that the “In God We Trust” is a generic image you got from elsewhere. Maybe MediaShout? I doubt many people will notice, but you still might be better off with a picture of your own kids up there.

The content on this page is a bit overwhelming. So many links, and I have no idea where to go next. In addition, some of the links are (surprise!) PDF files - no no. Having PDFs on the site is fine, but you should keep them clearly marked. A simple “(PDF)” after each file, or a PDF icon or something would be adequate.

The content on the subpages I looked at was pretty good, but could use a few more links. For example, on one page you suggest I “contact Heather McNutt…”. Why not link that to her page is the staff section so I can see her photo?

With that in mind, I headed over to the “Contact Us” page using the link at the top. This page suffers from the same spacing glitch as the worship page, but it has some good things going for it.

I like the bullets at the top - quick hits on how to get basic info. Visually, I would de-border things a bit. Lose the blue border on the photos, and maybe cut the border size on the table to just 1.

I found it odd that when I clicked on a person’s name I only got their photo and bio - what happened to their contact info? I would fully expect to have their phone number and e-mail on their individual pages, especially if you link directly to them like I suggested with the Heather McNutt example above.

Search engine optimization

There are a few things you can do to improve your SEO on the site. Doing these should drive a lot more traffic to your site, and they’re simple to do (though perhaps time-consuming).

First, you need to tweak your page titles. The worship page simply says “worship”. I’ll give you my standard page title suggestion:

Church Name - Church City, State - Page Name

So, your worship page would be:

First United Methodist Church - Birmingham, Michigan - Worship

You could change it to “First UMC” from time to time if you want, and “Michigan” could always become simply “MI”. Do this on every page of your site.

Next up are your page headers. You do a good job of putting a clear header on each page, but you format it poorly. Every page header is formatted by making it a font size=5, with various color and font options. Instead, wrap those headers in simple “H1″ tags and then mark up the H1 tag using CSS. You already have your H3 tags noted in your CSS file, so changing your H1s would be done in a similar way.

Finally, don’t abbreviate page names unless they’re really long. For example, Carl Gladstone’s page is “gldstn.htm”. That’s worthless in terms of SEO. Make it “gladstone.htm”, or even “deacon-carl-gladstone.htm”. If possible, point the old page to the new one using a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect will make sure that people linked to your old page automatically find the new one, and any PageRank from the old page will be passed on to the new one. However, since all of your pages are standard html (rather than PHP, ASP, etc), it’s a bit tricky. Here is a page with some information on how it can be done.

Conclusion

If I was looking for a church in your area and stumbled upon your site, I would be excited to visit. The church seems very active, which is a great thing.

Two suggestions left. First, finding the “home” button took a few seconds. Maybe put one on the top of your left-hand menu as well? I tried clicking on the graphic at the top too, which obviously didn’t work.

The final suggestion is a big one - create your own internal search engine. Using Google is a great temporary solution, but it’s got two major drawbacks:

1. New pages don’t show up right away.
2. You have no idea what people are typing in there.

By creating your own, it can instantly have every page listed, and you can keep track of what terms people are entering into it. This can be very valuable when you find that people are searching for “vacation bible school” and you don’t have anything posted for it yet! Here is a more comprehensive post about this.

Of course, to create your own search you’ll need to have a database-driven site which it doesn’t appear that you have. Given the massive size of your site, this really is the direction you should be going. It will be a huge project, but will make any changes much simpler in the future. Even if you don’t tackle it for a while, you should start looking into a bit.

Keep up the great work and feel free to leave your comments.

Posted in Site Reviews | |
7 Comments »