Friday, May 18, 2007

Web Site Analysis

Over a year ago I was talking to some of you about a complete new web site for our church. Due to my plate being full to overflowing I turned over the design and implementation of our new church web site to others. It still falls under the umbrella of media & technology for which I'm responsible. So, what I would like to hear from you is a brutally honest assessment of this new web site. Check it out at http://www.firstbaptistclover.org/

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm....

First off, let me preface this by saying that I do love volunteers, and I love when volunteers get involved. However, this website screams "church volunteer-created website" to me. Actually..it literally does. It says "by Clover's website committee."

There are some very good things about it, though.

It's thorough! There is tons of information on here. So anyone could find anything they want. However, the information might be able to be organized in a simpler way. To me, the site is catered much more for the church member than for the visitor.

The colors aren't too bad. I've seen a lot worse.

Now, the things that need some help:

It's made with tables. This is making the website look like it was built in the 90's, and I haven't done a validity check on it, but I doubt it's going to pass. All CSS would make things so much more cleaner..but not many volunteers know how to use CSS well.

There are many missing links and missing pictures. This is never good.

It needs a designer. While the colors aren't as awful as many websites I've seen, they could be better, and much of the alignment of tables is just plain not consistent. Again..moving over to CSS-driven design would help this immensely.

I do think that the most important thing about a website, however, is content, and this one does have plenty of it. However, I'm not sure if the content is particularly useful since there isn't any interaction anywhere. I believe church websites should be much more community-driven, as the church is a community.

All in all, it's not nearly as bad as many websites I've seen..but it just needs a transplant into today's design and communication.

Ernie Stevenson said...

Thanks Ryan! This is exactly what I'm looking for. I had a designer on the hook at one time but I believe that he was frustrated by the whole committee thing and kind of just dropped out.