New Guy

[wbcderek]

Hi all,

My name is Derek and I do the website for our church, among many other tasks but this is my favorite. Our site has come along way from when I started and there was 9 month old "news". But still has along way to go before it can become a ministry which is my goal. I open to tips, suggestions, even some constructive criticism as long as everyone realizes i'm not a super techie. That all being said you can check us out at www.woodlandministries.com (http://www.woodlandministries.com)

Derek

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Derek,

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for posting.

I'm looking at your site now. You use the CMS solution E-zekiel, so it will be a little hard to determine what on the site you can take credit for, and what is a feature that comes with E-zekiel.

You're doing a good job. Let me say that first before launching into the picky details, as I am want to do. Your church appears to be a large church with many ministries, so you've got a lot of content to deal with on your website (and update; I imagine it's been a pretty time-consuming job).

Certainly the rotating photos at top left on the home page is a nice touch. I've included a number of examples of this technique from church websites around the country on my "Seen and noted" page.

Service times, church address and phone number, and email link are right there on the home page, which I advocate. (It's one of my Top 10 church website design tips, and that, because so many church websites don't include this basic information on the home page.) So, good for you.

I checked out your map page. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is pretty much the opposite side of the country from you. Just for kicks, I requested MapQuest driving directions from Portland to Bradenton (Florida). According to MapQuest, I should be able to drive there in 47 hours and 28 minutes; total estimated distance: 3108.67 miles. And I have the route to get there now, courtesy MapQuest. See you on Easter Sunday.

No, I'm kidding.

On the "Our Worship" page, the photos of instruments and dancer are swapping out way too fast (on my broadband connection, anyway) ? to the point of annoyance. And anyway, I'd rather see streaming video of real services. That would allow me to virtually "experience" your worship and use of arts.

On the "Performing Arts" page, the two links under "Other Worship Ministries" are yellow against a white background, making them all but invisible.

Explanations of Performing, Visual and Technical arts (under "Our Worship") are clear and concise. Good job.

Life Groups: You've taken a lot of care to provide detailed information about on-campus options. But to be honest, it doesn't seem to me that the format of the information (e.g., listing room numbers) as it currently is posted is very helpful to the online visitor. I think you need to redefine the whole paradigm of the way you present the information. The online visitor doesn't need to know room numbers, for example, but which group fits his or her age bracket, gender, where he or she is on their spiritual journey, etc. Your goal should be to figure out a way for people to determine which group is best for them right there online, rather than have to send information about themselves using a form (a questionnaire) and wait a day or two for a response.

You list addresses of home groups online. Take a look at this forum thread

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/forums/showthread.php?t=16

to read the comments of forum members about posting private information online. This is FYI ? I'm not saying it's bad per se to include actual addresses.

And anyway, wouldn't a simplified map of the city with red dots showing locations of the home groups be more helpful than actual addresses, at least upfront? That would enable the visitor to quickly determine which home group is closest to him or her. Maybe the dots could be Javascripted to reveal the actual address upon mouseover. (This could be done well in Flash, too.) How many people would know where "12706 Tall Pines Way" (for example) is in Bradenton?

The videos on your Gateway for Ministry page are nicely done. However, allow me to point out, for future videos, two things: patterned backgrounds in videos (e.g., palm fronds in the pastor's office) don't compress as well as plainer backgrounds in videos (it takes more data to describe a patterned background in a compressed video than a plainer background, so when the former is compressed, you'll get a larger file), and showing a lot of empty stage (testimony montage) is something of a waste of bandwidth. (The testimony video stuttered a little even with my broadband connection. By cropping away some of the stage background, the file size of the compressed video can be made smaller, or the quality of the compressed file can be increased while keeping the file size the same.)

The links at the top of the main Our Ministries page (Worship, Small Groups, etc.) do nothing more than take you a few inches down the page to a single paragraph of copy (they're anchor links), from which you then link to another page. Seems to me you could eliminate one of these steps.

On the Life Care Counseling page, Men's Ministry page and Women's ministry page, there are some underlined subtitles and other underlined text. Underlining should be reserved for links, because that's what it's associated with now.

The Directory page, to be blunt, seems pointless. It requires the website visitor to actually know the names of staff members in advance, which is unlikely to be the case. Even members of your church probably don't know who all the staff members are, much less visitors. The page does provide the option of "Find all" but that yields just two names. Better to just provide a staff directory, listing all the staff. (Some large churches actually divide the staff directory up into several pages, e.g., Pastors, Support Staff, Ministry Staff, etc.)

Listing praise reports seems like an OK thing to do online, but listing prayer requests online seems a bit risky, given the world we live in and concerns about privacy.

OK, those are my comments. But again, you're doing a great job so far, and I can appreciate the amount of effort you already have put into updating and improving your site. Keep up the good work.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[HansR]

Welcome, Derek!

[wbcderek]

Hi Derek,

Welcome to the forum, and thanks for posting.

I'm looking at your site now. You use the CMS solution E-zekiel, so it will be a little hard to determine what on the site you can take credit for, and what is a feature that comes with E-zekiel.

You're doing a good job. Let me say that first before launching into the picky details, as I am want to do. Your church appears to be a large church with many ministries, so you've got a lot of content to deal with on your website (and update; I imagine it's been a pretty time-consuming job).


David,

Thanks for taking the time and taking a look at my site, I appreciate your ability to look at the "picky details" and your willingness to help us all be better at what we do. I'm going through your list now to learn from and correct the observations that you have given me.

I think one of the most important things for us all to remember that now-a-days people expect to see professional looking sites, and certainly should expect no different from their church sites. Look forward to becoming an active participant and thank you again for your ministry to us!

Derek

[David Gillaspey]

... thank you again for your ministry to us!
You're welcome!

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites