Upon surveying some friends and family members that traveled frequently, I asked them how they selected the church they would be worshiping at when they were in a different location. The overwhelming answer was the church that has a website that best displays what kind of service they provided and that had pictures of real people.

After doing some research on some of the local church websites in my area, I came to the shocking conclusion that they apparently don’t care about how their website looks or don’t have the right creative direction to send out the right message.

1. You have an over excessive use of animated clipart.
This may have been acceptable in the 90’s for personal home pages, but it should never be used on a church’s website.

2. You play background music that cannot be turned off.
If you want to really annoy your visitors, keep this feature because it works.

3. Your site is in frames.
So you figured that you would make it easy for the navigation to be updated. Too bad you didn’t realize that search engines and some web browsers cannot properly view frames.

4. The last time you updated the site was two years ago.
It’s always good to know what events took place in the past, too bad we have no idea what’s going on in the present.

5. You utilize scrolling marquee text.
Sure it may look okay on CNN, but it looks horrible on a website.

6. You use numerous font types throughout the website.
A little Comic Sans here, a little Arial there and a few Wingdings here, it’s a masterpiece! Perhaps only to a child.

7. You built the site using Microsoft Word.
It was easy, just outline everything how you wanted it and then save as webpage. It doesn’t matter how different web browsers and different screen resolutions see the site, because it looks fabulous on your screen.

8. You used Java or Flash for your navigation. Look at the pretty cool effect. It’s a shame that search engines have a hard time trying to crawl a site with that type of navigation.

9. You didn’t properly resize images before you added them on the site.
Why is that picture of the Pastor so blurry?

10. You have used the same website design for the past five years.
Why change it now? That old outdated look really defines our church.

It doesn’t seem all that shocking when you think about how we are constantly evolving technologically. Many people nowadays no longer use a phone book, when it is just as easier to find names and numbers online. A good church website design can go along way.

Is there more that could be added to this list? Please comment below to add on…

A good church website needs to be informative, visually appealing and have a bit of interaction with the visitor. After all shouldn’t your church’s website inspire people to visit your church physically? It can be easy to forget that people not in your local community may be searching for a church to attend a worship service. What features do you look for when you are looking at a church website?

Driving Directions

How do you get there? Sure an address is great, but a map or written directions would be better. Make it as easy as possible for the website visitor to locate your church.

Service Times

When do you worship? Often more times than not the service times are not listed on most church websites. Be sure to place your worship times prominently on the homepage of the site.

Sunday School

Let’s say that your visitors have children. What do you suppose they would like to know about your church? Make it well known that you offer a Sunday school service to avoid any confusion with new guests to your church.

Events Calendar

What if a member of your congregation misses a Sunday, but would like to know about the youth soccer game in the park? By having an up-to-date events calendar you can let your church members know what is going on.

Pictures

Sure stock photography is great in some cases, but what about those great pictures from your church’s mission trip? Be sure to include real pictures of your church and congregation. This will give your site a more realistic and personal touch.
And there you have it five features that a church website shouldn’t be without. Do you have any suggestions regarding church website features? Post a comment below…

Nobody likes limitations, especially on the web. Nine years ago when I was just starting out on the web design scene, the truth hit me and it hit me hard. After designing a few personal sites using a non web safe font, I realized that although it looked great on my screen, it looked absolutely horrible on everyone else’s. Surely, there had to be a way.

Fast forward to a few years later, I began to use images as heading text. This was the ultimate solution to my font crisis. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize the SEO benefit of text-only headings. Therefore, my image solution would have to go and I would have to search for another way.

Typically, header text is defined by the H1 tag. The H1 basically is a brief summary of what the content of the page is about. Search engines use this information when ranking web sites.

Let’s take a look at a common H1 tag:

After using some CSS to style the text, the output can look like this:

But what if we wanted to use a different font to jazz up that heading? We would modify our HTML like so:

Next we create an image to replace our header text. Make sure that the text in the image is the same as your H1 tag, since this helps with accessibility.

And finally, we apply our CSS:

This code will position our header image above our header text. When CSS is disabled the original header text will be displayed accordingly.

Here is our result:

Okay, so this works out great. But let’s say that you have dozens of pages on your web site. That’s a lot of images and different CSS classes to create. What if the header text needs to be changed? That would take more time and effort. Thankfully, there is sIFR.

sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, is a way to replace text on a web page with richer typography. sIFR uses Javascript, CSS and Flash to create a nicely accessible and search-engine friendly text replacement. sIFR will find the element of the page you wish to convert to a nicer font face and change it automatically. There is no need to create hundreds of image files or create many CSS classes.

You may notice that the headings on this blog have a non web-safe font. This is thanks to sIFR. Google has recently announced that sIFR is SEO friendly and ethical for their crawlers. Since Googlebot cannot fully see and understand flash, they will only see the original HTML H1 tag.

So there you have it, two ways to replace header text on a web page. Thanks to CSS and sIFR, header replacement is no longer limited. Be sure to be ethical and not abuse this information which may lead to getting banned from the search engines. Enjoy!

When it comes to measuring a website’s overall success online, many will feel that traffic makes the difference. The true reality of website success isn’t measuring the amount of traffic, but measuring the amount of conversions. What is the value of having a lot of visitors when they don’t become customers? Here are five surefire ways to help improve your conversions…

1. Cure Website Tunnel Vision

Believe it or not internet users have tunnel vision when it comes to online surfing. Imagine for a second that your entire screen is blurry and that you can only see an inch and a half radius around your mouse. This is how your visitors are looking at your web site. To correct this, make visual cues available. Such as placing pricing close to an order or add to cart button.

2. Put Call to Action Above The Fold

Not all visitors are web-savvy users. Place your call to action “above the fold”. Imagine looking at a newspaper. Newspapers put the most important information above the fold. This tactic applies to the web as well. Place phone numbers, contact information or order buttons above the fold so users won’t have to scroll down to find them. This can also aid in search engine rankings as well.

3. Stop Web Page Inconsistencies

Does your website look good in different web browsers and systems? If your web pages look bad to your visitors, chances are they will not convert. For one, trust is a key element in website conversion and it’s most likely that inconsistent pages on your site won’t get your visitor’s trust to convert. Read up on cross browser compatibility and test your site out with Browsershots.

4. Add Missing Prices

If you don’t list pricing information on your site, you are scaring your potential customers away. Not knowing the cost will make them believe that it is more than what they were planning to spend and will make them move on. The exception to this rule is if you provide a service that requires an estimate.

5. Add Photos

People hate surprises when it comes to online shopping. If you do not have a picture of your product, you are losing trust of shoppers. If you cannot supply a photo, a relevant image or visual cue is very helpful. Informing the customer allows them to make the decision to buy.

And there you have it, five easy to remember tips to add to your online marketing to increase conversions. Be sure to have product photos, make your site consistent, provide an easy to locate call to action and cure website tunnel vision. By applying these tips to a site with lots of traffic will be a true blessing for your bank account.

You might think to yourself that SEO and web design are two completely different services a website firm offers. But in reality, one service depends on the other to ensure a website’s success online; thus the phrase “SEO Web Design”.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making the content of web pages relevant to searchers and search engines so that it can be easily found when searched for. Web design is the creation of web pages that make up a website. When the two combine it creates a strong marketing medium for your business.

Initial Planning

Being prepared is always a first step when you start a website. First, you will need to plan out your pages. Starting with the homepage, list what information you will provide as content. Next, list the pages that will branch out from your homepage (Services, Products, About Us, Contact Us, etc.). This will be your initial navigation structure.

Once you have your pages planned out, you can start to develop content for them. When writing website copy, it is a good idea to write keyword rich text and have a minimum of 250 words per page. But it is very important to keep your text relevant. It doesn’t make sense to write about an unrelated subject on your services page.

Into SEO Web Design

It is important that you choose a web designer that fully understands how to create SEO-friendly websites. These sites are built for users and the search engines in mind. The pages should be laid out so that the content can be read and understood by every visitor, even those with disabilities.

Some navigations on websites prevent search engines and users with disabilities from browsing the site in its entirety. Make sure that your navigations are free of Flash and Javascript. Navigations that are plain text or CSS-driven will work perfectly in nearly every situation.

Links in paragraphs of text are very important for SEO web design. Make sure that your links stick out so that users can tell the difference between regular text and hyperlinks. If they are not, your visitors can get pretty frustrated.

Conclusion

So you’ve got a visually appealing website, full of great content and pages that are easy to navigate to. Your header and title tags are optimized for the best performance and your content is full of relevant keywords. By utilizing the SEO web design combination, you have successfully launched a great web site that is already setup for good search engine rankings. It’s a good idea to sit back and take a break as your site gets indexed.