Some favorite church websites

[crowsfan85]

Some of my favorite church websites are:

www.saddlebackfamily.com
www.crossroadschurch.com
www.fellowshipchurch.com

...among a lot of others.

[David Gillaspey]

I finally was able to take time to visit one of these sites -- Fellowship Church. I'll visit the others later.

In general, I feel Fellowship's site is well-designed and especially, well-organized (the home page is in my virtual gallery). By that I mean specifically that all the content (on the different pages) fits fairly tightly in the center area. (Some sites look great on the home page, then die a little on the "inside" pages because pages are really long.) Thus I agree with Nick's selecting this as a favorite site of his.

This site is example of a church website that actually is a portal to several ministries associated with the church (see lefthand column of homepage). Compare this church's approach with that of Shadow Mountain Ministries (http://www.shadowmountain.org/).

I liked the iPix tours (http://www.fellowshipchurch.com/fcweb/aboutfellowship/tour/t_worshipcenter.aspx) of the church's facility; I'll note this in my "Seen and noted" page. However, Idlewild Baptist Church (http://www.idlewild.org/templates/cusidlewild2/details.asp?id=21822&PID=59981) of Tampa, Florida, while it has fewer tours, provides interactive, user-controllable tours. The user can press and hold down on the mouse to direct the point of view of the video.

But Bellevue Baptist Church (http://www.bellevue.org/templates/cusbellevue1103/details.asp?id=1360&PID=178247&mast=) of Cordova, Tennessee, offers the best virtual tours I've seen (which hasn't been many so far). Most of the tours have a starting frame that includes a medium shot of a real person (smart thinking!). The interactivity is smoother, too: the video follows the mouse quickly (on my broadband connection, anyway), faster than with Idlewild's iPix tour.

But back to Fellowship Church's site. The site uses popups, e.g., for the different ministries linked to from the lefthand column of the home page, or to enable the users to search its small groups directory. The reliance on popups to me seems ill-advised. For starters, people hate popups because of their association with ads (see ?Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20041206.html) on the subject). Also one has to wonder how this site works in the popular new browsers such as Firefox that have built-in popup blockers. (Surprisingly, the popups on this website still work in Firefox, but they pop up really slowly, even on my broadband connection.)

Speaking of small groups directories, Fellowship Church's searchable directory of small groups ("Home Teams") seems to be really well done, ignoring for the moment the use of popups.

Another problem I have with this site is that it does not seem to be very accessible. A motion-impaired user, to be sure, would be able to access many links on the home page by tabbing through the page, although some links tab out of the expected order. But it doesn't appear to me that the main navigation links under the banner are in the tab order at all. Each of these is a drop-down menu with many more links. So it appears to me that much of this site is inaccessible to a motion-impaired person. This is a problem also for blind people.

I also spot-checked the source code of a handful of the pages, searching for the "alt" tag. In general, the site doesn't seem to use alt tags for images, which is important to blind people who use screen readers to browse a site. (Fortunately, there aren't a lot of photos on this site -- it's mostly text-based. But, because I hold a degree in photojournalism, I have to ask, why not? Why aren't there more photos?) I found two pages that did have alt tags. On one page, the alt tags were made equal to "The Alt Tag," while on the other page, the alt tags were made equal to the file name of the picture, e.g., "DSC05247.jpg". You can imagine how unhelpful those alt tag descriptions are to blind people when read aloud by their screen reader.

Now I realize I'm more concerned about accessibility issues than most people, but know that I have a good friend named Michael who is blind. (He's in one of the photos at the bottom of the "About this site" (http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/background.php) page.) He's unsaved. I'm not willing that he should spend eternity in hell because he can't browse a church or Christian website. For this reason, you'll hear a lot from me about church website accessibility issues.

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites.