Your feedback is appreciated...

[srwilson]

Hello -

(Answers to four main questions are bolded.)

I just introduced myself in the forum designated for that. Brief Recap: My name is Sonja. I've recently been handed the website responsibility for my church (as of Jan 08). I have zero experience with code except to layout a Myspace page and even that's minimal. :) I'm a bit overwhelmed, but am challenged to begin learning. I have no software as I do not design or code the web pages...yet. (maybe one day)

My website is hosted and designed/created by an outside professional design company. We're not sure we are completely pleased with them lately. The minor changes I've made have been through email and some have not been exactly as I envisioned. Probably my fault in not communicating clearly. However, once it's created...it's created. I believe we pay a monthly maintenance fee and then any changes/updates we make are a la carte charges. That doesn't appeal to me but I'm not sure how it usually works, so any input on that would be appreciated.

My role is to manage the content. In the past my pastor's wife did that, but she has too many other responsbilities and can't keep up the website as well. We did a major update to it last year and I believe she just laid it out in Word and the company updated the site with the content she provided. So that will be my job.

We are wanting to take the site to the next level and really use it as a tool of information about our church. Most importantly, we want to keep it updated. I did read the 25 tips and definitely saw some things that needed to be addressed. Right now, I'm looking for any minor changes we can make quickly that will give it a fresh look or be easier to the end user.

Here's what I'm looking for feedback on:
As the event coordinator, I'm concerned with advertising our events throughout the year on the website. What's the best way to do this? I've seen event calendars that have event links on them. Currently, we have a flash footer at the bottom of our home page that you can click on to see our upcoming events. It then brings up a new window that has an event flyer created in PDF. This was an example of something I requested, but not quite what I had in mind. However, they created it and we paid for it, so I'm utilizing it right now. I just don't think it's the best way to advertise multiple upcoming events at one time.

Secondly, we have a Reflections page under General that hasn't been updated since Summer of 07. Bad....I know. It's designed to be updated every two months to recap what our church has been involved in with events, special services, new members, etc. Do you think the reflections page is beneficial to our site? If so, should it be in a more "easy to find" location? Speaking of Reflections, I just realized our pics don't match what the update is talking about. I think the text is wrong and the pics are right as the pics are of events that happened later in the summer. (GREAT...how long has that been up like that?)

Thirdly, how do we set up a platform to purchase products on our site? My pastor's wife is gifted in teaching. She has several products that we advertise on our site and would eventually like to sell them along with our audio recorded services through the site (paypal or something?). Right now, the buyer would have to contact the church via phone or email to purchase through a check.

Fourthly, we will be hosting several conferences in the future and the bigger they get, the more the need would be to have an online registration platform. What would be involved in getting something like that set up?

(Maybe putting the cart before the horse with 3 and 4?)

Lastly, I'm open to ANY feedback, suggestions, observations, critiques you can provide.

The site:
www.turningpointministries.com (http://www.turningpointministries.com)

Thanks,

Sonja

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Sonja,

You asked several questions, which I won't attempt to answer in this critique. But in general, the added features you want should be available from your web developer, though of course that will cost the church more money. It may be that your church should consider going with a web Content Management System (CMS), either a proprietary (commercial) solution or an open-source (free) CMS. I list many vendors here:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/CMS_main.php

Their products usually include the kind of features you are looking for. The important advantage of these products is that you can do the web updates yourself, without relying upon another company and their schedule.

Here's the current home page:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point1.jpg

1. My comment about the home page is that it's a good design, though not exactly a spectacular design. The color scheme of olive and burgundy (or some shade of red) is pleasing. (The colors are different for each section of the website, however.)

I'm happy to see that the church's contact information and service times are listed right on the home page. On many church websites, the visitor has to hunt around to find this important information because it's located on an inside page.

The box with the contact information and service times is seen in the same spot on all inside pages.

Though I like the home page design, I think it's a little "empty"—though there's a few small photos in the banner and a graphic at the bottom, there's just text in between. The animation at the bottom tends to attract the user's eyes away from the text introduction to the church.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point2.jpg

2. (Above) These three small photos at top are kind of boring, in my opinion. (Different—and more interesting—photos are used in the banner on inside pages.) First, I discourage the use of building photos. A church is a body of people, not a building, after all. The shot of singer is the best photo, but even it's a bit boring. In the rightmost photo, the pews appear to be empty. So anyway, I would suggest replacing these photos with other photos. Use photos from events or context other than worship (not that there's anything wrong with photos from a worship service). Because the photos are small, use close up photos (showing one or two people) or medium shots (showing several people, from the waist up). Choose warm, engaging photos, e.g., photos of smiling people.

3. The typeface used for the menu is too light. I suggest using a bold font instead.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point2b.jpg

4. This nice "back to top" graphic is used throughout the site. It doesn't seem like it's necessary to use it on the home page, but then, I suppose if a user makes the type size really large, then the home page will extend below the bottom of the screen and the "back to top" graphic would be helpful.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point3.jpg

5. (Above) The Flash movie across the bottom points to (is linked to) just one page only, as best I can tell. If so, this is a tremendous waste of space. The home page of a website—a church website or any website—is valuable "real estate" (space). Most churches would put three ministry ads or more in the same space.

The Flash movie appears at the bottom of all pages except the Leadership => Technical Staff page—an inadvertent omission, I assume.

When this Flash movie is clicked, the user goes to ...

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point4.jpg

6. (Above) a page that is actually a 775 x 1017 pixel image. That's a really large image to download. The page instead should primarily be text based, with embedded photos that are much smaller and therefore much faster to download. It may be what is seen is a flyer, but putting the entire flyer online as a graphic is not a good idea.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point5.jpg

7. (Above) While I applaud the inclusion of a history of your church on the website, doesn't the use of the term "future" under the History menu seem like an oxymoron? Maybe it would be better to use the phrase "About Us" or something instead of "History."

8. (No screenshot) Sometimes the contact email is "turningpointchur@comcast.net" throughout the site and sometimes it's "TurningPointChur@comcast.net". I don't think there's any practical problem with the disparity, but it would be nice to be consistent. Also, the truncated "chur" looks like a mistake, through I'm sure there's a reason for this.

9. (No screenshot) Throughout your site, the subheads or subtitles are either boldface or regular (non bold) face. Again, there's no practical problem resulting from this, but it would be better to be consistent. Usually, subheads are set in boldface.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point6.jpg

10. (Above) On the General => Links page, many of the links wrap to two or three lines, but the user can't distinguish those links from links that comprise just one line. This is easily solved by adding space between paragraphs. I've demonstrated how this would look in the screenshot below:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/turning_point7.jpg

It's accomplished easily using Cascading Style Sheets.

I looked at all the inside pages. Basically, they're all laid out OK. I do applaud the frequent use of photos on the inside pages.

I hope these comments are helpful to you.

[JackWolfgang]

From the other thread, you stated that you have no web experience. I will try to be as clear as possible with these recommendations.


Images: None of the images on your site have alt attributes, which are short text descriptions of the image is. This makes your site inaccessible to people and programs who cannot see. Ask your web developer/designer to add meaningful alt attributes to the site. I said "people and programs" for a reason. Computers are illiterate. They cannot discern the differences between letters in images well (where as our brain can), and therefore, images are not indexed well in Search Engines (such as Google) unless they have alt tags. Jeffery Zeldman, a leading web author and designer, describes the Google search engine spider (the program or programs that index the web to build the search results) as "the blind billionaire" because of its ability to drive traffic to your site.
Flash: Your church's web designer used Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash. This requires an additional plugin to display, and not everyone in the world has it. Furthermore, it may not be properly integrated into a person's browser. When either of these happens, the user gets a "Download the plugin" message. Ask your web designer/developer to look at this article from A List Apart describing how to integrate Flash into a web site while supporting web standards: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay/.

Secondly, the title bar Flash appears to do nothing other than slide the pictures into place. It's a nice touch, but really unnecessary. Ask your developer/designer to replace the header with a static image.

Flash is useful for integrating audio and video into the site (but these should be done discreetly and started by the user, not automatically), but its really useless for main content because Search Engines cannot index it.
E-Mail Addresses: Ask your web developer/designer to convert the e-mail addresses on your site to contact forms to prevent spammers from harvesting the addresses. Spammers do this to send unsolicited commercial e-mail, most of which you probably don't want your church staff getting.
Web Standards: This is going to be the most cryptic of my comments, but I will attempt to make them clear. The web has syntax and grammar just like the English language. The sentence "jumped over dog brown lazy the fox red quick" does not make sense because the grammar is incorrect. In the same way, the elements of web pages need to be put together in a certain way to be interpreted correctly. Also the tags (what wraps the text in the web page) can be arranged to provide structure, much like puncutation in the sentence (example: "The panda is a large black and white bear that eats, shoots, and leaves." means something much different than "The panda is a large black and white bear that eats shoots and leaves.") Your web designer has 33 (X)HTML errors on your home page (the first of which is that they do not tell the browser what variant of HTML or XHTML to expect). Discuss fixing these with your designer/developer, and if necessary, recommend Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition, which should be available from your favorite online book retailer (it maybe over your head at this point, but there are chapters in the book which are useful for making the case for web standards).

[flutem3]

Welcome, Sonya,

Jack and David, would you give me a couple of examples of home pages which have "spectacular" design. I have not seen any yet that I would place in that category. But I don't exactly know how "spectacular" is defined. I think it would be in the eye of the beholder so to speak. :)

Carol

[David Gillaspey]

would you give me a couple of examples of home pages which have "spectacular" design.

Hi Carol,

That's why I maintain The International Directory of Church Website Design on my website.

I've sent you your login info separately. Go ahead and log in to my website (not the forum, but my website), then follow this link:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/results.php?sR=Yes&Display%21=Display+churches%21&sT=&bS=1

to see examples of good, even spectacular, church website design.

Of course, Jack and I have different definitions of "spectacular design," since Jack focuses on standards compliance and I focus on graphic design. Both emphases are important, but the purpose of the directory is to showcase good graphic design.

[flutem3]

That's why I maintain The International Directory of Church Website Design on my website. "The "on my website" wouldn't turn blue like the other. Neither did this, :confused: I got it. I wrote the rest of the memo and came back to it. It is weird though.

Hi, David,

I checked into the website earlier in the day and was looking around a bit. I found some nice websites, but I didn't find anything that I would define as "spectacular". We have also mentioned a WOW factor which I have yet to find either. One of the websites that I think is well done is Mickey's:

http://www.mtbethel.org (http://www.mtbethel.org/)

I like what he has done with that website. If you think I am thinking about redesigning ours, you are right. However, I don't want to change the design to something worse than what we have. People like it, and it is workable for me. I change odds and ends from time to time when I learn what will make it better.

I am not certain when to decide to redo a website. It was easy the last time because I had learned so much. Now, I have learned more, but they are more subtle things about websites which I know but another person viewing it might not discern.

I am wanting to put our Easter cantata on our website, but I have gone around and around trying to get copyright clearance. I know we have to have it, but I don't understand why some companies make it so difficult to get. Truthfully, I am fed up with the entire mess. I am going to make a call on Monday. If that doesn't do it, I give up. I am stuck. One place tells me to go to another, to another, around in a circle. It is enough to make a person dizzy! And it is really time-consuming as well...and that's the truth! :D If you or anyone else has a bright idea, please let me know! Thanks!!

Bless one and all,

Carol

[srwilson]

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[David Gillaspey]

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Hi Sonja,

I deleted a post like this made by you, earlier today.

I've seen these more or less blank posts before, but I've never been able to create them deliberately. Perhaps you could explain how or why you posted this?

Thanks.

[flutem3]

Hi, David,

This is what I am talking about. I cannot figure out how to read the post.

Carol

[JackWolfgang]

Jack and David, would you give me a couple of examples of home pages which have "spectacular" design. I have not seen any yet that I would place in that category. But I don't exactly know how "spectacular" is defined. I think it would be in the eye of the beholder so to speak. :)

Carol--

As David said, he tends to focus on graphic design, and I tend to focus on standards compliance. It may have something to do with background, as David comes from a more artistic background than I do.

I can't pull a spectacular design for a church off the top of my head. As for other sites, here's a couple:


http://stopdesign.com/ (with any of its styles, which are accessed using the prefs link at the top of the page)
http://mezzoblue.com/


Both of these sites look good to me.

Stop Design is standards compliant, and has the very cool style sheet switcher functionality.

Mezzoblue has validation errors right now, but it appears it's due to two tags not being self-closed.

One more site that is close, but not close enough to be mentioned in the above list is Florida State University's home page at http://fsu.edu. The site is Valid XHTML and CSS, but it has contrast problems when images are disabled and CSS is not (a rare case, but important nonetheless).

[JackWolfgang]

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David, I did this by clicking the Post Quick Reply button at the end of the page without typing anything in the box.