Church Website Help

Site review: Victory Life Center

Church: Victory Life Center - Pittsburg, Kansas
URL: www.victorylifecenter.org

Initial thoughts

One of the first things my eyes were drawn to was the heart in the upper right corner that said “1 John 3:16-24″ (note - not John, but 1 John). Offhand, I don’t know what that verse is. I expected to be able to click on it for more information about it, but was disappointed.

Scrolling down the front page I found a short list describing what each of the main links at the top are for. Again, though, I couldn’t click for more information. If you’re going to tell me “Staff features photos of key church personnel”, why can’t I click on it there?

Browsing around

So, I went back up the top of the page and clicked the staff link. I love the fact that each staff member has their own page, but I found it very odd that you didn’t list their names on that page - only their titles. I would think having their name and title on that page would make a lot more sense.

Going into a staff member’s page gave me more info, but the spacing seems a bit odd. I think that you vertically centered the text in that column on the left, rather than pushing it to the top. You can set “valign=top” for that cell and it will keep that info at the top of the column, which I think would look a lot better.

Moving on, I went to see what “Events” you had coming up. It’s a nice looking page with the little icons next to each item, but no dates? I was very surprised that you didn’t list the dates by each item on that page. Also, I expected the main text (”Guest Speaker”, “Special Valentines Service”, etc) to be clickable, but it seems that only the icon is.

The “Ministries” page had the same linking issue as the events page - the bold text on each item should be clickable.

The “Location” page isn’t bad, but has your tagline at the top twice, which certainly appears to be an error.

The “Sermons” page is nice and simple, and I like the detailed instructions on how to subscribe to the Podcast. However, two things need attention. First, the link to the MP3 for the January 14th sermon doesn’t work - 404 error. The file it’s trying to pull up is “011407.mp3.mp3″. I’m guessing if you removed one of those .mp3s from the filename it would work. Also, you mention that a PDF viewer is needed to view the sermon notes. What sermon notes? I looked back through 2006 and couldn’t find any, anywhere. Also, a link to Adobe’s site to download Acrobat Reader would be nice.

Search engine optimization

There is a lot that could be done to get your site ranked better in Google. Let’s start with your title tags. Right now, they ALL say “Victory life center”. I would suggest changing them to something like “Victory Life Center - Pittsburg, Kansas - Page name”, and have the “page name” change on each page - to the name of the ministry, or the staff member, or the event, or whatever.

The majority of the links on your site are images. Fortunately, you already use the “alt” attribute on all of them, so that’s a big plus. However, as I mentioned above, I would also link the text of items as much as possible and not just the images.

One thing that Google looks at to determine the content of a page is what text is found in the “H1″ tag. On every page of your site, it’s “Jesus is Lord Over Crawford County, Kansas”. That’s simply not needed. While it’s a perfectly fine tag line, putting it on the first page should be enough. On the rest of the site, use the H1 tag more effectively - “events”, “location”, “Pastors Don and Esther Talent”, etc.

Conclusion

It’s very obvious that this is an active church, and that’s a very good thing. I think the biggest thing you need is more internal linking to help people out. Specifically:

• All of the links I’ve mentioned above (”1 John 3:16-24″, events page, ministries page, front page “overview” list, etc)
• Right on the front page it says “if you have any questions please e-mail us…”.
• The logo in the top left corner. Yes, I know you have a “home” link right below it, but many people are used to just clicking the logo to go back home.
• The “Boot Camp” page mentions Pastor Pajo. Link over to Pastor Pajo’s page.

There are a number of weird grammatical/spelling errors. Some examples:

• Valentines Evening - you mention “potatoe”. Only Dan Quayle spells it that way.
• Just above the “overview of our site” on the home page you’ve got some strange capitalization — “… questions Please E-mail us…”. Why are “Please” and “E-mail” capitalized?

You show a lot of different faces in that space in the top right corner. Well done. However, a picture of your building somewhere would be nice. A lot of churches have their site focus on their building, and that’s not a good thing - you’ve avoided that well. However, it would be nice to know what the building looks like if I’m trying to find it for the first time one Sunday.

Feel free to leave your comments if you agree/disagree with anything in this review.

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Site review: Archdale UMC

Church: Archdale UMC - Archdale, NC
URL: http://www.archdaleumc.com/

Initial thoughts

Your front page has a lot going for it, but I wonder if it’s not too much. The first thing that caught my eye was the weather ticker on the top of the page. Is that really needed? The first thing I see on your site is your weather? That just doesn’t seem right. Having the little weather link in your menu isn’t too bad, but I’d lose the ticker.

Next, my eye went to the picture of your church building. It’s a neat picture, but I consider that to be the classic church website mistake. Your church is not your building - it’s the people. Show me a smiling couple, some happy kids, any people. Build a “facility” section for your building. I wrote a post about this a while back that explains my thoughts in a bit more detail.

(note: I later found your facility section, which is quite comprehensive. Pull it out of that JavaScript viewer thing and it’d be quite useful)

Browsing around

Now I started looking for information as a first time visitor to the site. Umm… Ah… I couldn’t find anything that told me what kind of church you are, what you believe or anything like that. I like that you have the events right on the front like that (shows that you’re an active church), but you need something to get a first time visitor started. I have no idea where to go next.

Ahh, I just noticed the “visitors” link at the top. You might want to drop a link to that section right above the birthdays. While others might notice it more quickly than I did, some will probably be as slow as me.
That leads to another small problem; I can’t click on “visitors” — I’m forced to use the dropdown. Nothing wrong with having a dropdown, but the primary button always needs to be clickable. The content on that page can be simple — just a bunch of links to the sub-pages — but I need to be able to click it. Of course, if I have JavaScript disabled (stats say anywhere from 3-10% of users have it disabled), the menu is completely gone. That’s never good. It’s fine if the dropdowns go away without JavaScript, but the primary buttons at least need to work. As it is, I’m toast with JS on your site.

Once I dig into the visitor pages, the content is pretty good. You give times and locations, and then describe the services. Well done. The one thing I would add is more links in that content. You mention the sanctuary - link me to a page about it. Other items on there that should be linked to more info: “sunday school”, “the pastor”, “chancel choir”, “baptism” (how can I get my child baptized there?) and “children’s church”. You already have pages for some of those items, so link ‘em up!

The map page is nice.

The church tour is cute, but looks to me like a case of “we can do this cool thing, therefore we should do this cool thing”. In my opinion, you’d be better off creating separate pages for each area and linking them up properly. Not only would it be easier to browse, but it would work for those without JavaScript and you’d be able to link to individual areas from other pages.

The aerial view of the building is a nice touch. One thing to emphasize might be the “DO NOT BLOCK TELLER LANES” at the bank. I see that large parking lot and then read your text and think “wow - they must have a lot of people there on Sunday mornings!”. Makes me think you’ve got something good going on that I need to be a part of.

The staff page should probably be broken down into individual pages. This will allow you to link to an individual from anywhere on the site (”for more information about VBS, contact Susie“) and you can put their picture on their own page rather than relying on the JS.

I just decided I wanted to go back to your home page, so I clicked the logo - nothing happened. Yes, I know you have a home link up at the top right near it, but I’m trained to click the logo and I’m sure others are as well. That’s an easy fix.
Your newsletters are well-marked as PDFs. I hate being surprised by a PDF. Nicely done.

Search engine optimization

I know you said that you have no intention of removing the frames, but they’re killing you in Google. I won’t go into great detail, but you can read the SEO section of my review of St. Andrew UMC and most of the ideas are the same for you.

However, you’ve got one big additional problem - that JavaScript menu. Google can’t read it, Yahoo can’t read it, Ask can’t read it. (not to mention some chunk of your viewers that can’t read it). If they can’t read it, they can’t follow it and it’s harder for those pages to make it into their indexes.

You’ve got a lot of great pages on the site. A more friendly menu and more internal linking and you’ll have a lot of those pages ranking well for useful terms.

You use “click here” more often than you should, but I know it can be hard to avoid at times. Still, whenever possible, have the link text be related to the link. An example of where you did this well is on your front page in the “Video Gallery” section.

Conclusion

The amount of quality content on the site is very impressive. If you could lose the frames and limit your JavaScript usage, I think the benefits would become visible very quickly.

The site feels very much like every time you find a neat gimmick you put it up on the site. Sometimes simpler is better.

The best part is that the church feels very alive. There are upcoming events all over the place, the pictures in the photo gallery are great, and I’m even still a bit inspired by the “DO NOT BLOCK TELLER LANES” thing.

Feel free to leave your comments below.

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Site review: St. Andrew UMC

Church: St. Andrew UMC - Mt. Pleasant, TX
URL: http://www.gbgm-umc.org/standrewumc/

Initial thoughts

The first thing I noticed was the white box at the top that told me your Wednesday night activities were cancelled due to ice - two days ago. Good use of the box at the top, but the notice needs to go.

While I think your text on the homepage is a bit Christianese for outsiders (and likely would scare away any non-Christians), I like the way you give so much information on the front page. You link things very well (worship, study, fellowship, etc) and then have the full table of events (again, linked well) at the bottom.

The overall look of the site is somewhat dated, but that’s always something you can work on. One thing that will help is to lose the thick borders on the tables. Make them a “1″, or use CSS to make them smaller than that.

While I love how the GBGM is helping churches get on the web, the URL you get is awful. For $8.95 at GoDaddy (or similar prices elsewhere) you can get your own domain name and forward it to your GBGM site. Users will still browse at the ugly URL, but you can print and promote a better address like www.standrewmtpleasant.org or whatever.

Browsing around

The links on the left are easy to see and easy to understand. I’m not a big fan of frames, mostly for search engine reasons. We’ll get into that later.

I started by going to the “worship” page to see what you had to offer. Nothing there blew me away, but you covered the main things I needed to know like time, childcare and things of that nature. Also, calling it a “traditional worship service” at a UMC gave me a good idea of what it would be like. However, for a non-UMC member (or non-Christian), they might need more information about what a traditional UMC service is like.

Having the “how to reach us” on the top of every page is great, and the information on that page is perfect.

The calendar opens up in a new window, which probably shouldn’t happen. Since you’re using frames anyhow, that information could just be framed in. Alternatively, you could put a link at the top of the calendar to return to the main site. Either way, you should probably do something so that you don’t have to have it open a new window.

A few things were missing — or else I couldn’t find them, which is just as bad.

1 - Staff. Who is the minister? Other staff? I like to have a separate page for each staff member so that whenever one is referenced on the site you can link directly to their page.

2 - Facility. While the focus of the site should be on the people and activities, it’s always nice to include some information about the building. This is especially useful if you mention a location and then can link to a page with more information about that building. For example, if you say “we’re meeting in the fellowship hall”, that means nothing to someone that has never been to your church. Having a link with a picture of the fellowship hall and it’s location on a campus map will help newcomers feel more confident when they arrive.

Search engine optimization

This section is a bit tricky for you because of the frames. Simply by having frames you are losing TONS of potential visitors on Google, and here is why - Google doesn’t like to index your individual pages because they all have the same URL. Every page on your site is simply http://www.gbgm-umc.org/standrewumc/. Most sites have “children.htm” and “mens-ministry.htm” as separate pages. Since yours are all framed, they’re all the same.

However, Google will sometimes pick up those individual pages, but that’s almost worse. If someone lands on one of your pages (like this worship page) they’re stuck without decent navigation. There’s always the text links at the bottom, but those don’t help a whole lot.

Having your pages framed also means that your page titles are all the same - “St. Andrew United Methodist Church, Mt. Pleasant, Texas, USA”. It’s not a bad title, but it never changes.

Finally, it’s very difficult to bookmark or e-mail individual pages. If someone is not paying attention, they might pull up your Youth page and then send a link to it for someone to check out. Of course, that link is still just www.gbgm-umc.org/standrewumc/ and the person that opens it will just get your homepage.

There are tricks that make it easy to put your menu on every page and still keep it easy to update, such as server side includes or PHP’s include command.

Conclusion

This site has a lot going for it, but could use some substantial changes. At the very least I’d try to get rid of the frames and then go from there.

You’re using StatCounter to keep up with your stats, and they do a good job. I’m somewhat partial to Google Analytics, but StatCounter isn’t far behind. However, I would lose the “xxxx pages visited on this website since March 4, 2005″, as it serves no purpose other than to show off the fact that only about 10 pages are viewed everyday. Your site should give the appearance of being very popular, rather than just admitting that very few people visit. To put it another way, look at any of the big sites out there (Google, Yahoo, CNN, etc) or any of the large church sites - they just don’t put the pageview count at the bottom. It was popular to do in the mid to late 90’s, but the time for that has passed.

The pictures scattered around on the site are placed reasonably well, but should probably be of the people at your church - not the building. You can give all of the info that you want about the building in a “facility” section, but have smiling faces be the main thing on the rest of the pages.

I hope those ideas help. If you (or anyone else) has other thoughts to add, feel free to leave a comment.

Mickey

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Site review: First UMC of Mt. Ephraim

Church: First UMC - Mt. Ephraim, NJ
URL: http://www.njfaith.com/

Note: A follow-up to this review was posted in July, 2007. 

Initial thoughts

I like the faces on the front and the “visitor questions” button right near the top. However, the title of the site threw me off. When I looked down at my taskbar, I saw “Welcome: Christians Cel…”. A bookmark would have similar text. I’ll get into the other title tags on the site in a bit, but that one certainly could use some tweaking.

Browsing around

My next move was to click on the “visitor questions”. Why does that open in a new window? If I’m on the site, I’m on the site. If I want it in a new window, I’ll open it in a new window. Very strange. That being said, the content of the visitor questions page is excellent. Short and to the point. You tell me how to get to the church, what you offer, what to wear. Those items should all be clickable, though. You say I can “discover engaging worship, music, education opportunities…”, so why can’t I click on “worship” or “music” or “education opportunities”?

This goes for the whole site. I went next to “Nurture my kids –> Nursery…”. Again, great content on the page but no links. You mention worship (a few times) and adult fellowship, but never give me a link for more info. If I’m new to your site, I have no idea where those pages are. Just give me a link.

Now I thought I’d see what’s on the main pages — “nurture my kids”, “serve others”, etc — but they don’t exist! I don’t think those pages need to have a lot on them, but they should at least pull up when I click on that text. If you wanted, they could just have a couple sentences that describe and link to the subpages. The “attend church” link works (it’s the only one that does), but then the page is blank…

Between the front page and the visitors center, you never once mention what time your services are.

I tried using the site search, but it never could load the results. The location of the search box up there on every page is great, but something isn’t playing nice right now.

Search engine optimization

There’s a lot that we can cover in here. Let’s start with the title tags.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the title tags could use some work. That’s not to say they aren’t pretty good already - they’re better than most churches. I outlined one problem before (how they show up in your taskbar and bookmarks), but some changes to them will help with SEO as well.

I always suggest you start with the church name, then include the location and page info after that (in either order). I’m not sure that “Christians Celebrating Unity” needs to be up there. It’s a nice slogan and certainly should be on the site, but not in every title tag.

Here is your current title on the Nursery page:

Nursery - Birth to 24 Months: Christians Celebrating Unity: First United Methodist Church of Mt. Ephraim

That’s a mouthful. I’d go something like this:

First United Methodist Church - Mt. Ephraim, NJ - Nursery

or even:

First United Methodist Church - Mt. Ephraim, NJ - Nursery - Birth to 24 Months

The next move would be to simply add more internal links. This will not only help with SEO, but it’ll make life easier for your visitors. Link everything! If you mention worship, link to it. If you mention your pastor, link to his picture/bio/contact. If you mention a building, link to a page about it.

However, link carefully. If at all possible, don’t link the words “click here” - make the link more descriptive. Again, this will be better for your users and for your SEO.

You’ve got a good chunk of JavaScipt on every page. Move it to an external file and then include it on each page. That’ll will mean less cruft for Google to sift through and it’ll move your content higher up the page (not to your users - just to the search engines).

Conclusion

It’s close to being a pretty great site. You need to put some info about the staff up there and do a lot of internal linking. A bit more text on the front about your church would be good. The information about the current series is nice to have, but some general info about the church (with helpful links) should probably be above it.

I just noticed - the footer of the site says “copyright 2005″…

That’s probably enough to work on for now. Feel free to leave comments below.

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Site review: Sojourn

Church: Sojourn - Voorhees, NJ
URL: http://www.gatheringfaith.com/

Initial thoughts

Good looking site. Soft colors, sharp graphics, quick-loading and easy to read. I was wondering what “Sojourn” meant, and having the answer on the front page is a nice move. I like when a church has some real text on the front page, but I wonder if yours isn’t a bit long. If nothing else, it seems aimed at Christians from other churches/denominations and not at the non-Christian that might stumble upon your site. However, I’m not good with writing those kinds of things so I’ll leave that alone now.

I notice the “user login” box in the lower left. I can guess at some of the reasons why you might have that, but thought I’d try to see for sure. I can’t. I would have thought that under the “not a member yet?” link there would be some reasons why I should register.

Browsing around

The directions page has a bug - your Google maps key isn’t registered for that site, so it doesn’t load properly. Other than that, the structure of the site seems very straightforward. I’m used to more traditional churches with individual areas (”student ministries”, “men’s ministry”, etc), so yours seems a bit strange. However, the more I browse around the more it seems to make sense.

Based on that, I assumed you were a small, new church. However, in the “serve others” area is mentions some of those areas like “children” and “youth”. Why is there nothing on the site for them?

I would encourage you to link internally a bit more. On the front page you mention the “coffee bar”. What is it? I should be able to click on it and get more information. The same thing for worship. It’s great that you put the time right on the front, but I expect to be able to click to learn a bit more.

Any people at the church? I can’t find faces of anyone, and couldn’t find a list of staff or even the name of the pastor. I saw “Rick’s blog”, so I’m guessing Rick is the pastor? Make it a little more personal by showing me some real people.

The search engine, frankly, is pretty weak. I love the fact that it’s on every page but the results were just a mess of text. It’s quite slow and the results don’t seem too useful. When I searched for “youth” and then for “children”, the first result was Rick’s blog and most of the rest were for pages titled “month”. Huh? Searching for “worship” was a bit better, but still didn’t show me a page that I was confident would give me the information that I wanted.

Search Engine Optimization

There are a few things that you could change to make your site a bit more SEO friendly.

While looking at your code, I see a good bit of JavaScript in there. That’s fine, but it doesn’t need to be embedded in the code for that page. You’re better off moving it to an external file and then calling for it on that page. It’ll work the exact same way for the users, but it’ll be less crud for Google to push through.

Your title tags are pretty good, but I always encourage churches to put their location in there. The only people that will come to your church after finding you in Google are people in your area. You want them to find you if they type “Voorhees church” or “Voorhees worship” or whatever. Keeping the city/state up there will help.

Your URLs look great (”about_us/virtues”, etc).

Conclusion

It’s a great looking site, but doesn’t really interest me in the church. It feels like just a website, and not a real church. There’s a lot of marketing-speak (especially on the front page), but nothing to make me connect with the people of the church. Another part of that might be due to the lack of info about upcoming events - and maybe there aren’t any yet if you’re a new church. I would expect to find things like “women’s night out coming in march”, “youth ski trip next week”, and things like that. Those help me feel like it’s an active church.

On the other hand, it’s very easy to find the important information (location, time, contact info, etc). Having the blog and the forum on there help connect people to the church. Browsing in there I found where Rick said you’d be changing the images on the top of the site to “real Sojourn people”, and that should help with the overall feel of the site.

Anyhow, good site. If I knew more about where your church in terms of age and membership, it might explain why I can’t find some of the things I expected.

Mickey

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Site review: Stonebriar Community Church

Church: Stonebriar Community Church - Frisco, Texas
URL: http://www.stonebriar.org

The first glance at this site is very impressive. Nice colors, good use of whitespace, and some slick rollovers.

I checked out the site in Firefox 2, IE 7 and Opera 8.5. It looked great in FF and Opera, but something was messed up in IE (shocking, I know). The header at the top (with the logo and the site map, newletters, etc links) was slid WAY over to the right and I had to scroll to see it. Very odd.

Also, I couldn’t get the “text size” buttons at the top to work at all on the home page. On some pages (”beliefs”, for example) they work great. On other pages (like “Women’s Resources”) they work a tiny bit. On the front page, they don’t work at all. Even on the pages where they work it only increases the font by a smidge. I love that they have them there, but they need to work more consistently.

In the large graphic in the center of the page was a link to the “visitor center”. That seemed like a good idea, so I gave it a click. The resulting pages were a great introduction to the church, though they were all buried in Flash. I don’t like being surprised by sound either, so the guy talking caught me by surprise. However, I though it was very well done and offered a GREAT personal touch. Once I was done in there I decided to head back to the main site, but a link wasn’t very evident. Maybe put one in the footer?

I eventually found a link in the “church life” section. I noticed that most of the links on the page used “click here” as their anchor text. This is bad form, both for search engine optimization and (to a lesser degree) user experience. I think that page could be make a bit cleaner by simply doing something like:

***************

Thank you…blah blah..here are a few links to our main website that you might find helpful:

• Women’s Resources
• Men’s Activities
• Children’s Resources
• etc…

***************

From there, I headed out the the Women’s Resources. As with the rest of the site, the look was clean and the navigation was simple. I like the “email to a friend” and “print this page” links as well. One odd thing I noticed was that the Women’s Resources page used an ugly URL (index.php?id=391), but the “print this page” for that page was a nicely formatted URL (print/fellowship/womens-ministries). Changing the the links of the main pages would help a lot in the search engines. Using mod_rewrite (which may be how you create the print pages) would keep things fairly simple.

I would also suggest tweaking the title tags of your pages. They’re already far better than 99% of church sites out there, could be improved a bit. My thought for churches is that the title tag should be something like “church name - church location - page name”. In the case of your Women’s page, it would go from:

Stonebriar.org: Women’s Ministries Home

to

Stonebriar Community Church - Frisco, Texas - Women’s Ministries Home

(I tend to use dashes instead of colons, but not for any good reason — either should be fine)

While I really like the three column look of the interior pages, I think more thought needs to be put into the content of the left-most column. It looks great when there are other pages to link to. However, I’ve found a lot of pages just have that area blank. You could either try to detect that dynamically and put alternate information there when there are no links, or put some extra info below the links that would fill it’s place when there aren’t any there.

There are a few places where I found an older site design, although this may be a known part of the new site changeover. One in particular is the “newsletters” section. Being that it’s linked from the front page, it probably needs to be updated as soon as possible.

Nice job with the staff section. I like to be able to see an overview of the staff and then drill down for more information about each staff member. I’d change their URLs if you can (a sample one - “http://www.stonebriar.org/staff/?no_cache=1&tx_xdsstaff_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=23&cHash=317a827ca4″), and get their name into the title tag on their own pages, but overall it’s well done.

I noticed that you have a dedicated page for Vacation Bible School. We added that as well a while ago, in the hopes to rank higher in Google when people look for VBS in our area. However, your VBS page is quite out of day (inviting me to register for VBS held in mid-June, 2006).

Conclusion

All in all, it’s a very well done site. Overall organization of a site this large can be challenging, but they’ve done a great job of sorting their pages out in a logical way. They keep the search box at the top of every page and a “contact us” link at the bottom of every page, along with the address and phone number for the church.

The site is functional in a nice variety of browsers. More importantly, it remains functional even when Java/JS is disabled. Many sites break once you take that away from them.

There are a quite a few small things that can be changed in order to help the site rank better in the search engines. Making those changes will likely result in a good boost in traffic in the next 3-6 months.

Have other thoughts about this site? Leave them in the comments below.

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Google Analytics

One of the major keys to success for any website is to know how you’re doing. You need to know why is visiting your website, how they found it, what pages they looked at, etc. Most web hosts include free software for that - often Webalizer or Awstats. Check in the control panel for your website and you’ll probably find something in there.

Regardless, I strongly recommend that you check out Google Analytics. It’s another free perk from Google, and it does a great job of tracking stats for your site.

As you may have noticed from this blog, I am big into search engine optimization. I think it’s important for your church to rank well when people are using Google. By going into the “Marketer” section of Google Analytics and then into “Overall Keyword Conversion”, I can see every search phrase that led people to our site. I can see them grouped by year, by day, by week - whatever.

By looking at stats for this January (1st - 18th), I find that most of the queries are for some form of “Mt. Bethel” or “Mt. Bethel UMC”. Very normal. However, I notice that we’ve had 23 visitors arrive after searching for “must ministries”. Sure enough, if I go to Google and search for it, we come up fourth. Very cool. Now I just need to make sure our page that it lands on is in good shape, which it is.

Another interesting one is “church scrapbooking”. We just started a scrapbooking group a few months ago, and it’s nice to see that we already rank for this.

Of course, the golden queries are ones that might actually lead to visitors. While it’s great to rank well for “must ministries” and “church scrapbooking”, neither of those have any geographical phrases in them, so the odds aren’t very good that the user lives anywhere near us. They might say “oh, they have a nice scrapbooking program”, but if they live 1000 miles away it doesn’t help us much.

A good example of that is “marietta day care”. Two visits this month so far from people searching for that. This is good, because it’s someone that lives near us, is looking for a daycare, and found our daycare page. Google Analytics also tells me that they viewed an average of six pages each, so I’d say there’s a decent chance that they’re interested in our facility.

If I sort the results by “pages per visit” it gets kind of neat. We had a user that searched for “church gym weights, atlanta, ga”, found our site and then viewed 47 pages! Another one was a user that searched for “bible studies cobb county ga” and then viewed 21 pages. Another was for “grief support groups in marietta ga” that viewed 13 pages. There is a good chance that at least one of those three users visited our church.

Anyhow, go give it a try. It’s free and it’s easy to set-up. If you have any problems with it, simply leave a comment on this post or start a new thread in our forums.

Mickey

Posted in Other Tips | |
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Any websites or questions for me?

Please let me know if:

• You’d like me to review your website and find ways to improve it.
• You’ve found a site that is especially well done (or is especially poorly done).
• You’ve got a comment or question.

You can reach me at mickey@churchwebsitehelp.com

Thanks! 

Posted in CWH News | |
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Show people, not buildings

I’d venture to say that close to half of all church websites feature a photo of the church on the front. It’s somewhat logical, but it’s not very well thought out.

Ask any minister “what is the church?” and they’ll almost certainly reply “the people in our congregation” - and it’s true. A church building is just a building, but the people inside are what make it work.

When someone pulls up a church website, they want to know a lot about the people and programs at the church, and very little about the building itself. If you want to use part of your church building as your logo, that’s fine, but make sure the focus of your front page is on people and not the building.

That being said, it’s fine to discuss your building inside of the site. We have a whole section on our site about our facility, so that people can see the various buildings, find their way around, etc.

Show them your church when they come to your site - and save your building for later.

Posted in Site Content | |
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PDF is for printing

Check out this great article about why PDFs should typically be used only on documents that are meant to be printed - not on “normal” pages. I find many sites have PDF files all over the place, for things that have no business being in that format.

I had intended to write a long article about this, but it’s summed up so well on Web Pages That Suck, that there’s no sense in me re-writing it.

Mickey

Posted in Site Content | |
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