Site review: Sojourn

Church: Sojourn – Voorhees, NJ
URL: http://www.gatheringfaith.com/

Initial thoughts

Good looking site. Soft colors, sharp graphics, quick-loading and easy to read. I was wondering what “Sojourn” meant, and having the answer on the front page is a nice move. I like when a church has some real text on the front page, but I wonder if yours isn’t a bit long. If nothing else, it seems aimed at Christians from other churches/denominations and not at the non-Christian that might stumble upon your site. However, I’m not good with writing those kinds of things so I’ll leave that alone now.

I notice the “user login” box in the lower left. I can guess at some of the reasons why you might have that, but thought I’d try to see for sure. I can’t. I would have thought that under the “not a member yet?” link there would be some reasons why I should register.

Browsing around

The directions page has a bug – your Google maps key isn’t registered for that site, so it doesn’t load properly. Other than that, the structure of the site seems very straightforward. I’m used to more traditional churches with individual areas (“student ministries”, “men’s ministry”, etc), so yours seems a bit strange. However, the more I browse around the more it seems to make sense.

Based on that, I assumed you were a small, new church. However, in the “serve others” area is mentions some of those areas like “children” and “youth”. Why is there nothing on the site for them?

I would encourage you to link internally a bit more. On the front page you mention the “coffee bar”. What is it? I should be able to click on it and get more information. The same thing for worship. It’s great that you put the time right on the front, but I expect to be able to click to learn a bit more.

Any people at the church? I can’t find faces of anyone, and couldn’t find a list of staff or even the name of the pastor. I saw “Rick’s blog”, so I’m guessing Rick is the pastor? Make it a little more personal by showing me some real people.

The search engine, frankly, is pretty weak. I love the fact that it’s on every page but the results were just a mess of text. It’s quite slow and the results don’t seem too useful. When I searched for “youth” and then for “children”, the first result was Rick’s blog and most of the rest were for pages titled “month”. Huh? Searching for “worship” was a bit better, but still didn’t show me a page that I was confident would give me the information that I wanted.

Search Engine Optimization

There are a few things that you could change to make your site a bit more SEO friendly.

While looking at your code, I see a good bit of JavaScript in there. That’s fine, but it doesn’t need to be embedded in the code for that page. You’re better off moving it to an external file and then calling for it on that page. It’ll work the exact same way for the users, but it’ll be less crud for Google to push through.

Your title tags are pretty good, but I always encourage churches to put their location in there. The only people that will come to your church after finding you in Google are people in your area. You want them to find you if they type “Voorhees church” or “Voorhees worship” or whatever. Keeping the city/state up there will help.

Your URLs look great (“about_us/virtues”, etc).

Conclusion

It’s a great looking site, but doesn’t really interest me in the church. It feels like just a website, and not a real church. There’s a lot of marketing-speak (especially on the front page), but nothing to make me connect with the people of the church. Another part of that might be due to the lack of info about upcoming events – and maybe there aren’t any yet if you’re a new church. I would expect to find things like “women’s night out coming in march”, “youth ski trip next week”, and things like that. Those help me feel like it’s an active church.

On the other hand, it’s very easy to find the important information (location, time, contact info, etc). Having the blog and the forum on there help connect people to the church. Browsing in there I found where Rick said you’d be changing the images on the top of the site to “real Sojourn people”, and that should help with the overall feel of the site.

Anyhow, good site. If I knew more about where your church in terms of age and membership, it might explain why I can’t find some of the things I expected.

Mickey