Hello

[Mel-O]

Hello everyone!

My name is Melissa and I manage several websites connected to our church, Church on the Rise, in Westlake OH.

Most of the sites were designed by professionals and I took over updating content a year ago. I've attempted one small redesign but it has some issues I'm working on (browser compatibility is a big problem, why can't everone just use IE???).

For the past year, I've been allowed approximately 5 hours a week for web related work and I spend about 20 hours a week maintaining our CMS and another 14 hours a week being the office manager. Effective immediately, I have been blessed enough to hand off my office manager duties and therefore gain 14 hours for web!!

I have no formal training in the field other than self taught learning from books and online content. I do have a passion for all things techy and had been praying for years for an opportunity like the one I'm in. I had been in the mortgage business for 15 years and got out just before the bubble busted! God is good!

Most of our sites are being edited through FrontPage (ugh) but my first redesign was done in Dreamweaver. Now I've been fortunate to have a mentor take interest in me and I've begun my journey into the world of Visual Studio, SQL server, C#, ASP.net, etc. It will take me awhile to get up to speed on this but ultimately I feel these are the tools I need to take our website to the next level.

From reading info on this forum and another website, I have begun to take the "web related work" and turn it into a "Web Ministry." Our church theme is to connect people to God, other People & Service and I've created an outline of how this can be accomplished through Web Ministry. I do believe God has placed this calling in me and while I don't have any idea how it will play out, I do know God is faithful and will use me in a great and mighty way for His Kingdom!!

If you want to critique our main site, go ahead! I know it needs work and I need all the help I can get as I begin research and planning of it's redesign! www.churchontherise.net (http://www.churchontherise.net)

Thanks!
Melissa

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Melissa,

Thanks for joining the forum and posting about yourself and your church website.

I'll try to give my comments in a few days. My first impression is that the design is quite nice.

If you follow this link, however,

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.churchontherise.net%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

you'll get a list of areas in which the code can be improved upon (on the home page, at least).

I have found that using a validator service such as the one cited helps me find and correct errors in my code.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Melissa,

Here are my comments. Hopefully you've browsed some of the other reviews on this forum and know already that reviews here are frank and honest.

First, I've shown below a screenshot of the current home page, for the benefit of others reading this post:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor1.jpg

What the screenshot doesn't show is that the large photo in the middle changes every few seconds. Also, at top left, the colorful camera lens iris rotates slowly. That's a nice touch — an effective use of Flash because it doesn't annoy or distract.

1. As I stated before, I think this is a nice design.

The service times are at top left, right under the rotating iris. The church's phone number and address are at bottom right. Both are important to include on the home page of a church website, and you've done that.

(To make this easier, I'm writing this as if you designed and produced the site, even though that's not really the case.)

2. It's good to have those rotating photos in the middle of the home page, but I would encourage you to work on the quality of the photos. (Or pick better photos.) One of the current photos has a decided red cast. Another includes overly lit people in the bottom left area, while the top right area is dark and has a reddish cast from the lighting. In the photo of the pastor preaching on stage (shown above), the pastor is a bit hard to distinguish from the background.

Since these photos are what visitors to your site first see, it seems to me you want to make the best impression possible by using the best photos possible.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor2.jpg

3. (Above) One of those photos includes signage that unfortunately ends up looking like a dropdown menu, albeit at an angle. I actually clicked on the signage in the photo to see if it was a menu.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor3.jpg

4. (Above) In your top menu, you have both a Log In button and a Log Out button. It would seem to me that you only need one button, the label of which would change as necessary from Log In to Log Out. (Besides, unless there's another clue I can't see because I'm not logged in, how would anyone know if they're logged in or not if they always see both buttons?)


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor4.jpg

5. (Above) Along the right and bottom sides of the home page are graphical ads (marked in the screenshot with X's). Four of the six graphics include ALT (alternate) text in the source code, which is good; two don't include ALT text, however.

The "Catch the Vision" graphic at middle right (the one that includes a photo of the pastor) is actually an image map, but both areas of the image map point to the same URL. That seems a little silly to me.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor5.jpg

6. All four of the graphics along the bottom of the home page rely on Javascript (example source code above) to open the links in new windows. With Javascript turned off, the links just don't work. (Try it.)

I have no idea why anyone would turn off Javascript in their browser, but I can say that just a couple of days ago, Firefox was glitching on my computer and I couldn't access my online banking account (through a browser) because the login button was Javascript enabled. I was annoyed.

It seems to me that one should use simple, flawless, HTML links instead.

7. (No photo.) In the source code of your home page, you have the <body> tag six times. There should only be one <body> tag and one corresponding </body> tag in the source code of a webpage.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor6.jpg

8. (Above) When a visitor clicks on "Weekly Bulletin" in the top menu, they're actually downloading a pdf of the bulletin, and not going to another page on the site. It seems to me that any button or link that violates the user's expectation (it's a link to another page) should be identified as such. Thus, consider making the button text read "Weekly Bulletin (pdf)".

Don't assume that visitors know this is a downloadable file. It is possible for a weekly bulletin to be a webpage.

9. (No photo.) Both the Log In and Log Out pages look bad, in that their layout is not contained in the nice, centered rectangle that visitors see on other pages. Moreover, the Log Out page does not take the user back to the home page, nor does it give the user a button or link to return to the home page. The link in my browser's address bar looks like this:

https://integration.fellowshipone.com/integration/logout.aspx?cCode=D96lICoHNKWUimogNcsDBw==&flo=true

Therefore, the user cannot just delete a portion of the URL in the address, and hit Enter to return to the home page of the site. (This is the get-back-to-the-home-page option of last resort, and the visitor can't even do that on your website.) Make the reduced size banner at top left on this page a hotlink to the home page.

10. (No photo) At the time of this writing, this page, http://www.churchontherise.net/youth.php, has a large, 500x500 pixel graphic that is blowing out the layout.


http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/cor7.jpg

11. (Above) You've "hidden" several important ministries under the "Weekly Services" menu item in the left column. Thus, visitors have to find these links in the slideout submenu shown.

The format of these ministries may very well involve services that are weekly, but still, it seems to me, links to these ministries deserve to be found under a button with a more obvious label such as "Ministries." If a visitor wanted to learn about your church's youth ministry, I don't believe they would start by looking under "Weekly Services." This term is usually associated with services in a church's main auditorium.

Also, in menus, I discourage using the actual name of a church's ministries, e.g., "Storm Youth, "Storm Center," and "Echo Young Adults". Such labels require familiarity with the church that a visitor may not have. Stick with simple labels such as "Children's," "Youth," "College," "Junior High," "Senior High," etc. On the pages to which these links point, then, you may use the actual names of ministries.

12. (No photo.) The "What To Expect" page (New to COR => What To Expect), http://www.churchontherise.net/expect.php, is nicely laid out. However, the first thing a visitor sees on the page is a photo of kids raising their hands. I'm not sure how that answers the question, "What to Expect." Maybe a graphic showing the layout of the building would be more helpful?

The FAQs page (New to COR => FAQs) also is nicely laid out.

The "Take A Tour" page (New to COR => Take A Tour) — actually a slideshow in a small popup window — also is nicely implemented, but where are the captions? You should include captions so visitors know what they're looking at as they browse the photos. This particular link is another one on your site that requires Javascript to be enabled in order to work.

*****

Well, (sigh), I've reached my two-hour limit. (I limit myself to spending two hours at most on these reviews.) There's a lot of areas of your website I didn't get to; perhaps other members will comment on those.

Hope these comments are helpful to you.

[JackWolfgang]

(browser compatibility is a big problem, why can't everone just use IE???).

Welcome the forum. I want to address this issue straight away.

Many non-users of IE fall into the following categories:


Mac Users. Microsoft discontinued IE for the Mac with version 5. Safari, Firefox, and Camino replaced them.
Windows users who believe that Internet Explorer is not the best browser that runs on the Windows environment.
iPhone users. Apple has locked them into Safari for the time being.
Some other mobile users are locked into the mobile version of Opera.


It's not our job to pigeonhole our users into the browser where we most feel comfortable; our job is to make our content available to as many users as possible regardless of technological or biological differences.

Standards compliant web design goes a long way towards crossing the technological divides, and it's a good starting point for biologically accessible design. Not everyone is as blessed as you and I with acceptable eyesight and normal range of motion. For people with disabilities, we must allow their assistive technology to be able to access our content for their consumption.

[JackWolfgang]

I was playing with a friend's iPhone at lunch today. One of the things I did was to visit my church's website (http://www.fcctlh.org). I am happy to report that it looks pretty much the same on the iPhone as it does on my Windows desktop, albeit smaller.

Pardon my brag....

[StubbyD]

Hi Melissa and welcome ....

As to why doesn't everyone use IE then let me add one more to Jack's already good list....

SECURITY.

I will never use or even trust IE as a browser ever again. And when I visit sites that don't work in my chosen browser (firefox as a by the by) then I just use the "act like IE" addon to fool the site.

OK - got that out, hope you find the site useful.

[JackWolfgang]

Hi Melissa and welcome ....

As to why doesn't everyone use IE then let me add one more to Jack's already good list....

SECURITY.

I will never use or even trust IE as a browser ever again. And when I visit sites that don't work in my chosen browser (firefox as a by the by) then I just use the "act like IE" addon to fool the site.

OK - got that out, hope you find the site useful.

Stu--

I think that fell under my broad umbrella category of #2 :) :

Windows users who believe that Internet Explorer is not the best browser that runs on the Windows environment.

[StubbyD]

Stu--
I think that fell under my broad umbrella category of #2 :) :


he he - ok, I'll accept that one.