Thank you all and hello from Long Island NY

[mdhervey]

Hello,

I have been silently checking on on the various forums and the web site for about a year. You have all already helped me very much to redesign my church's web site (you should have seen it before!).

Our church is Commack United Methodist (http://www.commack-umc.org) on Long Island, NY. I have tried to emulate many of the best practices that I have seen on other sites and I would very much like to get any and all feedback that would be helpful in improving the site.

Thank you for the help that you've already given and thank you in advance for your feedback

Mike H.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for joining the forum, and posting.

I'll repeat the same caveat I gave earlier this week when I commented on another church website on this forum: I can be kind of tough.

As always, I use the word "you" while recognizing that someone else may have actually created all or parts of the website.

1. First, do away with the background of leaves. Heavily patterned backgrounds such as this have fallen out of favor with website designers and now — except in the hands of really skilled designers — make a website look dated. (Backgrounds of subtle patterns, however, have made a comeback. ) Use a white or solid color background instead. (By this I mean the background on either side of the rectangle that constitutes the actual website.)

2. You have a lot happening on the home page — too much, in fact. One of the basic principles of graphic design is that a composition should have an area of emphasis or a focal point. I can't say that principle is really followed much in website design, but your home page is so busy I don't know where to start looking. Everything's grabbing my attention. One reason for this is the layout of three equally wide columns. That almost guarantees no photo or graphic element will be bigger than another, and thus be the focal point of the page. A standard format for websites (one of several standard formats) is a wide middle column with a narrow column on the left and/or the right. Try that.

3. The banner is just the right depth — down to the navigation menu, anyway. Below that are two pictures side by side that appear to have no purpose. Remove them. They waste valuable screen space.

4. At the top of the middle column is a vertically scrolling marquee. I'm especially against horizontally scrolling marquees, which is yet another beloved technique from the early days of the internet that make a site look dated now. I tolerate — barely — vertically scrolling marquees such as the one on your home page. But I find it to be very distracting and so would still encourage you to remove it.

5. The "Learn More" dropdown menu doesn't always want to go away when I mouse away. The dropdown is so buggy (in Firefox on the Mac) that I gave up using it and started using the replication of it on the left side (that appears once you get inside the website).

6. While your church undoubtedly has a proud UMC heritage, it's vital to understand that this heritage means nothing to an unchurched visitor. Your website is way too UMC-centric. Tone it down, to extent that you are able. (Yes, I can imagine the resistance you'll face.)

7. The Education page has a graphic with a broken link.

8. Back to the banner on the home page: It's great that you added a soft shadow behind the name of the church (and the other words there), but the offset's too much, making the words appear to float way above the banner. Good technique, just too much of a good thing. Reduce the offset (how many pixels to the side and down the shadow is).

9. You have the church address and contact information on the home page. That's a good thing, and often not found on church websites.

Looking at the source code:

10. You have a tables-based layout, but I can see that you are using CSS for style. That's a good middle ground. (Some people advocate dispensing with tables altogether and using CSS for layout, but I recognize that's beyond the abilities of 95% of church webmasters at this point in time.)

11. On the home page, at least, I see a consistent presence of ALT attributes for graphics. Good for you! This is vital for accessibility.

12. Your home page (at least) ends with two BODY and two HTML tags. This is a coding error that probably should be corrected.

That is all for now. I hope these comments will be useful to you.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites
(and forum administrator)

[mdhervey]

David,

Thank you for your feedback. As an engineer I am better at wiz-bangs than visual design.

After your feedback I put some ideas in front of the person who does web design at my work and his feedback was very close to yours.

As a result, I've taken some of your suggests and done a significant tune-up of http://www.commack-umc.org (http://www.commack-umc.org/). As it sits now, I belive that is has more focus and a better look. I still want to do some work on the banner and perhaps colors. I also took some time to get more practiced at CSS control of the web site.

As always, I would be happy for any additional feedback.

Thanks Again

Mike

[ibda12u]

Hello mdhervey,

I didn't get to view your site, before the changes, but what I see now, looks quite functional, and seems to look a lot like David was commenting on. One other thing you may want to try, on your homepage where the service times are. Instead of the red table, perhaps leaving the table white (or transparent, then making the font red (same red as in your logo). Often times that will give you the amount of contrast you want, while still highlighting your text.

Thanks, very functional site overall!

[StubbyD]

Hi Mike and welcome.

As with ibda12u I didn't see the site prior to your changes. However I have two minor concerns about the new design and both can safely be ignored if this is your deliberate choice.

I like the layout and the three column 'newspaper style' approach but it all looks overly compressed to me. Maybe it's my tired old eyes today but it just seems pushed for space. If I were to put my 2c in to why, then I'd have to say that the left and right handd most columns are too wide.

The other thing that doesn't appear right is the page footer. The colour is too pale and the font appears fuzzy.

Other than these very minor aspects it looks excellent. I haven't trailed through the rest of the site but if it matches the home page then a good job done.

[JackWolfgang]

8. Back to the banner on the home page: It's great that you added a soft shadow behind the name of the church (and the other words there), but the offset's too much, making the words appear to float way above the banner. Good technique, just too much of a good thing. Reduce the offset (how many pixels to the side and down the shadow is).

I can't see the banner in Firefox because my Flash isn't integrated with Firefox. I've seen so many church web sites do this, including Granger Community Church (a big technically saavy church with paid IT staff) on a promo page and their home page. My advice would be drop the Flash or put in an alternative that doesn't leave me with a green puzzle piece telling me I lack a plugin.

For me, this isn't an accessibility problem, it's a matter of I don't have the time, energy, or desire to fix this problem. However, for some, it is an accessibility problem. Nevertheless, it should be corrected so that it doesn't turn away potential church members.

10. You have a tables-based layout, but I can see that you are using CSS for style. That's a good middle ground. (Some people advocate dispensing with tables altogether and using CSS for layout, but I recognize that's beyond the abilities of 95% of church webmasters at this point in time.)

Jeffrey Zeldman advocates this as a middle ground in Designing with Web Standards, 2nd Edition.

11. On the home page, at least, I see a consistent presence of ALT attributes for graphics. Good for you! This is vital for accessibility.

That is excellent! It's another thing that not many do, but needs to be done all the time.

Edit (Adding this comment about Granger): Actually, Granger Community Church does this on their home page, too. Not nice at all.

[Websquad]

The other thing that doesn't appear right is the page footer. The colour is too pale and the font appears fuzzy.

Mike, I looked at your CSS for your footer, and have three recommendations:

(1) Change the 70% to 100% in the #footer section
(2) Make the "color" a little darker to increase the contract
(3) Try making the a:hover with a white color and a contrasting dark background ... you'll have a neat mouse-over event with some good visual feedback.