Comments on our site appreciated

[wccarmichael]

Hello Fellow Web Dev'rs,

I invite you to take a look at: http://theorchardchurch.org
Comments, suggestions, critiques, would be welcomed.

I've had this site up for several years, evolving since we launched the church in Loganville, GA. The goals of the site are:

1 - establish a PERSONAL connection with the pastor & with our people
2 - convey a PERSONAL feel for what our church life is like
3 - provide all necessary information to empower a visitor to come visit

I have a heavy emphasis on photographs of people. The intent is to both make a personal connection with web visitors, and reinforce personal connections with folks who have visited our church and are following up with the web site.

I'm in the process of converting the site to a DotNetNuke implementation to encourage more lay content development, and to encourage more sub-site development (ex: http://theOband.org) so I have the opportunity to make radical changes.

Thanks for any suggestions!

- bill

[chrisb_ebc]

Thanks Bill and welcome,
Site looks good. I like the use of pictures of people in your church. How do you go about getting permission? Have you gotten permission? And if so, how did you implement and keep track of that information. I have been trying to think through this as a web designer, I recently have taken on the position at our church as "Media director". I would not call myself a director, but more of a Advisor. I have been trying to determine the best course of action with this without throwing up to many Red Flags of legality and the sort. I was just curious. Thanks.

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Bill,

Nice site. I like the personal touch it has. The only advise I would have is that the information looks sort of bottled and not very dynamic, your switch over to DotNetNuke should be able to take care of that though.

Chris,

you can google photo permissions and get a framework to work off of. I don't worry about pictures of adults that much, but I have a photo permission section in every event release form I have and nobody has objected yet.

Kyle

[chrisb_ebc]

Hi Kyle.
I have actually searched google for some form examples and have wrote up a pretty basic form. I was just curious how he or anyone implemented this. Do you have a wavier signing once a year to cover your basis, and make them readily available if anyone is interested. Or do you hand them out at certain events. Say I want to shoot one sunday at church of a whole bunch of things. Do I have everyone sign one a couple of weeks in advance and only cover that time. How do you keep track of it if anyone says no. Our church is some 350+ people. I don't know everyone's names....so do you have a few people in church who knows a good amount of people to filter through your images so that they know if there "safe". Those are some things I am wondering and has anyone tackled this. If so. What are your methods, what works best for you?

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Chris,

Here are the guidelines that we have;
1.) Events in public spaces, say the park picnic. No liability (not a legal staement I could be wrong about this)
2.) All pictures of Children-Must have permission: No individual pictures of children under ? ( we have it set for first grade, if they aren't in sunday school yet their face doesn't go on the site.)
3.) Events requiring release forms- For most of your youth events and servent projects some type of release form is needed. Add a short paragraph with a initial and you have permission from that person. **Note make sure you spell out the duration of the permission, i.e. "calendar year 2006" or it is assumed that it is good for the event only.
4.)Tell people at on site events that you are going to be taking pictures of the event and if anyone doesn't want their picture published in the newsletter or on the website to come and talk to you.


An alternate idea is to get together with your pstor or any other leaders and start a photo ministry. That's another google search and discussion entirely.

hope some of this helps.

kyle

[mickmel]

I love your use of pictures, but I think you might have gone a bit too far. I say that because of how much text you have buried in images. For the most part, you're much better off keeping your text and images separate, both for useability and for search engine rankings.

Here are some of my other thoughts, most of which have to do with ranking well in the search engines:

- Change the links in your menus to text and use CSS to create the rollover effects. This will make your page load more quickly (not that it's especially slow now, though) and will help you a lot in Google.
- Move your CSS and Java to external files as much as possible.
- Make sure your title tag reflects the content on each page. Right now they ALL say "theorchardchurch index page Loganville GA". Clean it up, make it look nice, and have it be relevent to each page. Make sure to keep Loganville in there on every page as well (like you already have).
- Try to move much of the content out of the PDF and onto your site. Again, this will make your site easier to use and it will get ranked higher in the search engines.
- Be very intentional about pointing out which links to go PDF files. You've done a good job of this, but not great. When I go to the "contact us" page (which is linked on every page of your site - good job), I see "ministry teams" at the top and want to check it out. I likely won't see the little "(requires adobe reader)" three rows down on the other side of the page.
- Pages like the youth page are great, with lots of pictures mixed in with the text. Well done. (however, there's a broken image on the youth page)
- The "look inside" the school is great. Very informative.
- Make sure the page headings are marked as page headings, using the H1 tag. Right now you use some messy CSS and font tags that give the same look, but it's a BIG difference in the eyes of the search engines.

I hope that info helps.

Mickey