Site review: First UMC of Mt. Ephraim

Church: First UMC – Mt. Ephraim, NJ
URL: http://www.njfaith.com/

Note: A follow-up to this review was posted in July, 2007. 

Initial thoughts

I like the faces on the front and the “visitor questions” button right near the top. However, the title of the site threw me off. When I looked down at my taskbar, I saw “Welcome: Christians Cel…”. A bookmark would have similar text. I’ll get into the other title tags on the site in a bit, but that one certainly could use some tweaking.

Browsing around

My next move was to click on the “visitor questions”. Why does that open in a new window? If I’m on the site, I’m on the site. If I want it in a new window, I’ll open it in a new window. Very strange. That being said, the content of the visitor questions page is excellent. Short and to the point. You tell me how to get to the church, what you offer, what to wear. Those items should all be clickable, though. You say I can “discover engaging worship, music, education opportunities…”, so why can’t I click on “worship” or “music” or “education opportunities”?

This goes for the whole site. I went next to “Nurture my kids –> Nursery…”. Again, great content on the page but no links. You mention worship (a few times) and adult fellowship, but never give me a link for more info. If I’m new to your site, I have no idea where those pages are. Just give me a link.

Now I thought I’d see what’s on the main pages — “nurture my kids”, “serve others”, etc — but they don’t exist! I don’t think those pages need to have a lot on them, but they should at least pull up when I click on that text. If you wanted, they could just have a couple sentences that describe and link to the subpages. The “attend church” link works (it’s the only one that does), but then the page is blank…

Between the front page and the visitors center, you never once mention what time your services are.

I tried using the site search, but it never could load the results. The location of the search box up there on every page is great, but something isn’t playing nice right now.

Search engine optimization

There’s a lot that we can cover in here. Let’s start with the title tags.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the title tags could use some work. That’s not to say they aren’t pretty good already – they’re better than most churches. I outlined one problem before (how they show up in your taskbar and bookmarks), but some changes to them will help with SEO as well.

I always suggest you start with the church name, then include the location and page info after that (in either order). I’m not sure that “Christians Celebrating Unity” needs to be up there. It’s a nice slogan and certainly should be on the site, but not in every title tag.

Here is your current title on the Nursery page:

Nursery – Birth to 24 Months: Christians Celebrating Unity: First United Methodist Church of Mt. Ephraim

That’s a mouthful. I’d go something like this:

First United Methodist Church – Mt. Ephraim, NJ – Nursery

or even:

First United Methodist Church – Mt. Ephraim, NJ – Nursery – Birth to 24 Months

The next move would be to simply add more internal links. This will not only help with SEO, but it’ll make life easier for your visitors. Link everything! If you mention worship, link to it. If you mention your pastor, link to his picture/bio/contact. If you mention a building, link to a page about it.

However, link carefully. If at all possible, don’t link the words “click here” – make the link more descriptive. Again, this will be better for your users and for your SEO.

You’ve got a good chunk of JavaScipt on every page. Move it to an external file and then include it on each page. That’ll will mean less cruft for Google to sift through and it’ll move your content higher up the page (not to your users – just to the search engines).

Conclusion

It’s close to being a pretty great site. You need to put some info about the staff up there and do a lot of internal linking. A bit more text on the front about your church would be good. The information about the current series is nice to have, but some general info about the church (with helpful links) should probably be above it.

I just noticed – the footer of the site says “copyright 2005″…

That’s probably enough to work on for now. Feel free to leave comments below.