Overall, I live the experiencestonebriar site, and I agree with your thoughts behind it. I was simply trying to be as critical as possible.

I tend to put the church name first so that it’ll show up easier in user’s toolbar and bookmarks. In both of those cases, you often get 20 characters followed by “…”. If you have “Vacation Bible Schoo…” in your bookmarks, you have no idea where it’s from. On the other hand, the text at the beginning is thought to have more SEO weight, so doing it in the order that you suggest certainly could be the way to go.

I can relate to your problems with old content. We have a similar system set-up with our site, but I’m sure you can find outdated content somewhere. That was more of a “here’s an old page to fix” comment, rather than pointing out an overall flaw. Come to think of it, I don’t recall seeing ANY other outdated info. The “find a problem with this page” could be good, especially since you already have the email/print buttons on every page.

The keyword idea is great! I was very proud of the search engine on our church site until you mentioned that – now I need to go fix it!

Some responses:
I am not seeing the IE nav problem you are seeing, but the text resize thing is obviously not working. It worked when we implemented it, but some tweaks must have interfered.

The link from the main image on our home page actually takes you to a second site, our welcome site. You can find it at http://experiencestonebriar.org The idea with that site was to provide a place we could point people who are not members/attendees of our church to get familiar with Stonebriar. So on mail pieces, we would include that URL instead of our main site. At the time, this was because we had more visitors than we could handle (we literally had 3-400 new adults every week), so attracting folks from search engines was not a priority (thus the use of flash). So there is some history for you. I agree that the lack of a prominent link back to our main site was an egregious error. At the time we thought it was a good idea.

As for mod_rewrite, we do have human readable urls, but the old urls still work also. The experience site was linking to the old URL and once you have linked in the CMS dynamically keeps generating the messy URLs.

Your suggestion for title tags is solid, though I would move the last part to the front, as I read recently presenting different content in that area for every page is classic SEO… though you obviously still want the other information you suggested. Dashes are nice too, I agree.

Your comment about the newsletter site being old is quite funny, actually. It is the same design, just a different color and different front-end coding. We used tables and other font designation methods because it is the only way to get all email clients to receive the mail. Now, if you are referring to the newsletter archive page, that is being generated dynamically and we never went back to style it. Looks horrible.

The staff section is being generated dynamically and the variables are put into the URL. We have not yet figured out how to rewrite those urls unfortunately.

Our content creators are supposed to use the function in our CMS that takes content offline on certain dates. The VBS page you found should have been offline after the event. I am sure there are places all over our 400+ pages that are like that. Tough call in deciding if you unleash your ministries to contribute content or if you hold the reigns tight and play the gatekeeper. We have decided to let open the flood gates and deal with the problems as they come up, but we need a better method for finding outdated content. Some discussion has been brought up about putting a “Find a problem with this page?” link that would allow surfers to report the problem.

Thanks for the Kudos as well! The site was a great learning opportunity for us and our new site coming out in April should not repeat these mistakes (though we will have others).

Oh, one other thing we created that I think more churches should try to do is our equivalent of AOL Keywords. For instance, type “Mission India” or “missionindia” into our search engine and you are taken straight away to http://www.stonebriar.org/expression/missions/mission-india/ . However, if you type “india” you are presented search results. Any time there is a one for one match between a search term and page/section then we create a reference that takes them there. This also allows us to have print pieces which reference “Stonebriar.org “Keyword: Giving”, etc.

Thanks again for the review!