Church: Archdale UMC – Archdale, NC
URL: http://www.archdaleumc.com/
Initial thoughts
Your front page has a lot going for it, but I wonder if it’s not too much. The first thing that caught my eye was the weather ticker on the top of the page. Is that really needed? The first thing I see on your site is your weather? That just doesn’t seem right. Having the little weather link in your menu isn’t too bad, but I’d lose the ticker.
Next, my eye went to the picture of your church building. It’s a neat picture, but I consider that to be the classic church website mistake. Your church is not your building – it’s the people. Show me a smiling couple, some happy kids, any people. Build a “facility” section for your building. I wrote a post about this a while back that explains my thoughts in a bit more detail.
(note: I later found your facility section, which is quite comprehensive. Pull it out of that JavaScript viewer thing and it’d be quite useful)
Browsing around
Now I started looking for information as a first time visitor to the site. Umm… Ah… I couldn’t find anything that told me what kind of church you are, what you believe or anything like that. I like that you have the events right on the front like that (shows that you’re an active church), but you need something to get a first time visitor started. I have no idea where to go next.
Ahh, I just noticed the “visitors” link at the top. You might want to drop a link to that section right above the birthdays. While others might notice it more quickly than I did, some will probably be as slow as me. 
That leads to another small problem; I can’t click on “visitors” — I’m forced to use the dropdown. Nothing wrong with having a dropdown, but the primary button always needs to be clickable. The content on that page can be simple — just a bunch of links to the sub-pages — but I need to be able to click it. Of course, if I have JavaScript disabled (stats say anywhere from 3-10% of users have it disabled), the menu is completely gone. That’s never good. It’s fine if the dropdowns go away without JavaScript, but the primary buttons at least need to work. As it is, I’m toast with JS on your site.
Once I dig into the visitor pages, the content is pretty good. You give times and locations, and then describe the services. Well done. The one thing I would add is more links in that content. You mention the sanctuary – link me to a page about it. Other items on there that should be linked to more info: “sunday school”, “the pastor”, “chancel choir”, “baptism” (how can I get my child baptized there?) and “children’s church”. You already have pages for some of those items, so link ‘em up!
The map page is nice.
The church tour is cute, but looks to me like a case of “we can do this cool thing, therefore we should do this cool thing”. In my opinion, you’d be better off creating separate pages for each area and linking them up properly. Not only would it be easier to browse, but it would work for those without JavaScript and you’d be able to link to individual areas from other pages.
The aerial view of the building is a nice touch. One thing to emphasize might be the “DO NOT BLOCK TELLER LANES” at the bank. I see that large parking lot and then read your text and think “wow – they must have a lot of people there on Sunday mornings!”. Makes me think you’ve got something good going on that I need to be a part of.
The staff page should probably be broken down into individual pages. This will allow you to link to an individual from anywhere on the site (“for more information about VBS, contact Susie“) and you can put their picture on their own page rather than relying on the JS.
I just decided I wanted to go back to your home page, so I clicked the logo – nothing happened. Yes, I know you have a home link up at the top right near it, but I’m trained to click the logo and I’m sure others are as well. That’s an easy fix.
Your newsletters are well-marked as PDFs. I hate being surprised by a PDF. Nicely done.
Search engine optimization
I know you said that you have no intention of removing the frames, but they’re killing you in Google. I won’t go into great detail, but you can read the SEO section of my review of St. Andrew UMC and most of the ideas are the same for you.
However, you’ve got one big additional problem – that JavaScript menu. Google can’t read it, Yahoo can’t read it, Ask can’t read it. (not to mention some chunk of your viewers that can’t read it). If they can’t read it, they can’t follow it and it’s harder for those pages to make it into their indexes.
You’ve got a lot of great pages on the site. A more friendly menu and more internal linking and you’ll have a lot of those pages ranking well for useful terms.
You use “click here” more often than you should, but I know it can be hard to avoid at times. Still, whenever possible, have the link text be related to the link. An example of where you did this well is on your front page in the “Video Gallery” section.
Conclusion
The amount of quality content on the site is very impressive. If you could lose the frames and limit your JavaScript usage, I think the benefits would become visible very quickly.
The site feels very much like every time you find a neat gimmick you put it up on the site. Sometimes simpler is better.
The best part is that the church feels very alive. There are upcoming events all over the place, the pictures in the photo gallery are great, and I’m even still a bit inspired by the “DO NOT BLOCK TELLER LANES” thing.
Feel free to leave your comments below.
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