Help
for Church Webmasters
Issue
20
4/08/03
Have
you ever been to a truly beautiful website? You know the one I am talking
about, the gorgeous graphics, dynamic colors, and great layout. You know, the
“perfect website.” Now, how many times have you gone back to that perfect
website? “If” you did go back to it, why did you go back? Was it to look at the
great design? Or did it have information that you wanted?
There
are some truly wondrous websites out there; unfortunately most of them aren’t
church related sites. But when we stop to think about it, we don’t become
repeat visitors at a site because it looks good. We are repeat visitors because
it provides information that we desire. Example, Google.com. It’s not a site
that I would call beautiful. In fact it is mostly white space. But it does two
things. It loads quickly and provides the information you want. Can you say the same thing about your church
site?
Now
there is nothing wrong with having a high design site that looks good. But
there are some things to consider, if you were doing a site for an art gallery
or an architect firm, I would expect a different design and layout than if you
were doing a site for a construction firm or a hospital. The design somehow
needs to match the focus of the site. Religion has a long history of great art,
so there is nothing wrong with having a church site with a great, artist
design. The problem is that I posses the art skills of the average 7-year-old.
So I went to Google and searched for web templates and low and behold, for a paltry
fee (and sometimes even free) there were a plethora of designs just begging to
be used. Now there aren’t tons of religion based templates out there, but there
are some. Here’s one place I found some. http://www.helendesign.com/cgibin/modex.cgi?religion
This
seemed like a great deal, beautiful design, wondrous graphics, bold color and
in some cases even flash animation. Woooohoooo. So I started intently looking
for a design that I could use. I even spent time looking at non-religion based
templates figuring I could modify it for my own use. I found some possibilities
and my hopes were soaring. Finally the church was going to have a site worthy
of our divine calling. As I sat down with some blank sheets of paper (see issue
11 - http://www.downeychurch.org/BackIssues/Issue11.html) to start redesigning the site, the wheels fell off. I ran
into all sorts of problems. First of all, the design was great on the main
page, but it didn’t work so well on the other pages in the site. I didn’t want
to devote that much screen real estate to design. Secondly, the navigation
schemes didn’t work for me. I couldn’t get all my links to other pages
included. Thirdly, there wasn’t enough text on the page. Let’s look at these
issues a bit more deeply.
1.
Screen real estate.
The designs I looked at were great. But they used a lot of screen real estate.
This was an issue, but I could deal with it on the main page (see item 3 for
more on this), but I wasn’t happy with this design on the other pages in the
site. It’s like I needed a lite version of the design for the other pages. Now
in all fairness, some templates do include a second template for the other
pages in the site (not the main index.html). But even then I was not happy with
it. I didn’t really like that design for the Kids Zone, or for the newsletter
page or for … etc. You get the idea. It worked in some cases, but not all of
them. Also, many templates do not have white background, so many of the
graphics that are inserted on the website would have to be converted to
transparent gifs. This is not the end of the world, it is just more work.
2.
Navigation.
I write a lot about navigation, because this is a VERY important part of your
website that is often overlooked. What good is it to have great information if
people can’t find it? Also, the search engines are going to need to be able to
navigate your site to find all the pages, if you’ve “hidden” your navigation
scheme from them (with frames or a flash animation, for example), you’ve really
hurt your rankings. Many templates used graphics or flash for the navigation
scheme. This can limit the number of pages you can link to and also hide your
navigation from search engines. I don’t like making my users having to make
multiple mouse clicks to get to a page. It’s not that multiple mouse clicks are
so difficult, but if I have to click two or three times to get to something, that
usually means I couldn’t tell this item was available from page I started at. I
had to discover it. Websites shouldn’t be a treasure hunt.
3.
Enough text on the page.
It is very important to have text on your page. The search engines use the text
on the page to determine what your page is about. Not only that, but it is very
important to use your key words in the text. The closer to the top you use your
key words - the better it is. Many of the templates don’t allow for a lot of
text. And most of that text is for news items or announcements of up coming
events. So your page is going to be ranked by your Easter service announcement,
instead of other important information. I was not so thrilled with this!
So
where am I now? I’ve come to the conclusion that a template based site might be
good if you want an online brochure for church and you don’t plan to change it
too much. It’s a couple of pages that look good, but there’s not really current
information and not a lot of in depth resources and information about the
church. Of course, this is my personal opinion and you may come to a different
conclusion. In fact, I would really like to hear from anyone who might be using
a template for his or her site.
Does
that mean templates are useless? By no means! I learned a lot about design from
this exercise and I am still tossing around ideas in my head. Will anything
come form this? Only time will tell. Remember, it’s wrong to steal someone
else’s design. It is not wrong to look at someone else’s design and be inspired
to do something – even if it is similar. So there is value in looking at these
templates, even if that value is just to inspire you to improve your site. Not
to mention, someone might find a template that suites them and their site just
perfectly.
See ya,
Bill
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