Archives For Site Content

Items that discuss the content you should have on your church website, along with formatting tips.

Consolidating plug-ins with Jetpack and WordPress SEO

June 27, 2012 — 2 Comments

Over the past few weeks I’ve been going through the WordPress sites that I manage (roughly 100 of them, between my projects and clients) and refining the choice of plug-ins on each of them.  I’m using InfiniteWP to keep them all updated, but I’ve been manually working through them to add/remove various pluings.  Two plug-ins in particular are replacing 8-10 plugins on most of my sites.

WordPress SEO

[ Get the WordPress SEO plugin here] Joost de Valk (also known as “Yoast”) is a highly respected WordPress developer, and this package includes quite a few great tools to help with the search engine optimization of your site.  I had previously used a handful of plug-ins (mostly from Joost) to accomplish my goals, but this package is now more functional than those individual pieces.

  • Canonical URL’s — To make sure Google knows the true URL of each page.
  • Google XML Sitemaps — To create (and submit) sitemaps of your posts/pages.
  • Robots Meta — To include robot meta tags in certain areas of the site to prevent duplicate content issues.
  • RSS Footer — To add a snippet of text (and a link) at the bottom of your RSS feeds to help take advantage of people that scrape your feeds.

This is an excellent plug-in, and he updates it regularly with new features.  The one piece that this doesn’t replace is PuSHPress, which enables PubSubHubbub support to your site.  In short, it makes new entries go out really fast to people that get your posts using Google Reader and similar tools.

Jetpack

[ Get the Jetpack plugin here ] Similar to WordPress SEO, this plug-in replaces a variety of plugins that I’ve been using over the years.

  • Subscribe to comments — I hate it when I comment on a blog but they give me no way to subscribe to email updates of subsequent comments on that particular post.  This takes care of that.
  • Various social plugins — I’ve used a variety of social plugins (Digg Digg, ShareThis, Sociable, various individual networks, etc), but this takes care of them all in one place.  However, it doesn’t yet handle Pinterest so if you want that you’ll still need to add it separately.
  • WordPress Stats — If you like the WordPress stats plug-in, you now need to use Jetpack to stay current on it.  This offers nice lightweight stats, though I also include Google Analytics on every site.
  • Contact forms — This replaces other contact form scripts (Contact Form 7, etc), though I still use Wufoo most of the time.

Other plugins

So those two plug-ins have replaced many of the ones I used to use, but I still have a decent collection that are also installed for most clients.  They include:

  • Akismet – An excellent anti-spam plugin, which comes standard with WordPress, though you need to activate it.
  • Disqus Comment System — A replacement for the built-in comment system (and replaces the need for Akismet, Highlight Author Comments and some of the features in Jetpack).  I use it on a few sites, but not too many yet.
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith — If you push your RSS feed out via FeedBurner, this a great plug-in to help direct people to the proper feed.
  • Highlight Author Comments — This allows you to style author comments a bit differently then normal comments, so they’ll stand out when the post author leaves a comment on the post.
  • InfiniteWP Client — I manage most of my WordPress sites using Infinite WP, and this is a required piece of that.
  • jQuery Lightbox for Native Galleries — This turns normal WP galleries into cool lightboxed galleries. Here is an example.
  • PuSHPress — As I mentioned above, this enabled PubSubHubbub support on your blog, which means it goes out to RSS readers really fast.
  • Shadowbox JS — Allows you to do some neat shadowbox trick with media on your site, like popping YouTube videos up in little boxes.
  • Widget Logic — Allows you to pick and choose which pages particular widgets should appear on.
  • WPtouch — Creates a mobile-friendly version of your site automatically.  While I prefer to use mobile responsive themes instead of this, it can be helpful for older blogs.

There are a few others that I use from time to time depending on the theme (various sliders, theme-specific plug-ins such as Genesis Simple Edits when working with a StudioPress theme, etc), but that’s my main list.

 What are your favorite WordPress plug-ins?

In Site Content, WordPress , , , ,
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Your competition isn’t always right

August 26, 2011 — 6 Comments

No matter what line of business you’re in, you can often get inspiration and ideas by checking out your competition.  You can see what kind of stuff they’re putting on their website, how they’re using social media, what new products they’re stocking, etc.  However, you ultimately need to trust yourself.  Here are a few examples.

Using music to set the tone

I was recently talking to a client about her site, and suggested we take the background music off.  After a brief discussion, she agreed.  When I asked why she put it up there in the first place, she said that a lot of her competition did that and she was trying to match them.  Being a brand-new business, emulating some of the established sites is certainly a great idea.  Now that she’s removed the music and they haven’t, she’s a step ahead!

Facebook “welcome tabs”

I have a lot of clients asking for “welcome tabs” on their Facebook Page.  While it’s certainly appropriate in a few situations, it seems that most people are doing it simply because everyone else is doing it, and no one is really thinking it through.  Most users come to your Facebook page for the content — information, specials, etc.  Why put an extra page in their way?

It feels a lot to me like the “splash pages” everyone had in the late 90′s — simply an unnecessary step between your user and the content they want.  We all eventually realized how stupid those were, so how are Facebook welcome tabs any different? (Honestly — leave a comment and convince me how they’re a good thing for everyone.  I’m certainly open to changing my mind if someone can supply a solid argument.)

Copying the church down the road

One church I worked at was obsessed with the other big church just down the road.  We’d often spend thousands of dollars copying activities that they did, even if we didn’t need them.  It was quite sad.  There were essentially two ways that our leadership viewed things:

  • If they’re doing x, and we’re not, we need to start.
  • If we’re doing x, and they’re not, we need to stop wasting time on it.

This was especially problematic during the rise of social media, because the “other church” was slow to adopt it.  Therefore, it was tough for us to convince our church leadership that it was worthwhile.  The “other church” is a wonderful place, but they have made some very poor technological choices over the past few years; very dumb things with their website, very little social media, etc.  Copying them in those areas would have been a foolish mistake.

Stylish restaurant websites

Have you ever tried to pull up a restaurant website on your phone?  It’s almost always brutal.  Slate recently had an article about this, and I agree completely.  Not only are they often unusable on a phone (especially an Apple device, with no hope of loading their cute Flash menus), but they’re equally frustrating from a normal browser.

My thought is that it’s the restaurant owners and their desire for a particular ambience that cause most of the issues.  While you certainly want the actual restaurant to have that feel, putting cheesy background music being a painfully “creative” navigation bar isn’t the way to do it on the website.

The University website

(via xkcd.  awesome site)

Part of this comes back to the problem of the University website.  Universities think that we want to read about the school’s philosophy and press releases, and that idea is validated by other universities posting the same junk on their home page.  This is very similar to churches that post a big link to their denomination’s website, rather than providing decent driving directions.

Check them out, but be smart

I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t see what your competition is doing.  As I said at the beginning, you can often get some good ideas from them.  Just be smart, and always view things through the eyes of your customers.  Ask yourself, “if I was a customer, why would I visit the site and what would I be looking for?”  If the answer is “cheesy music and a mission statement”, find someone to help you think through it a bit further. :)

In Church, Companies, Facebook, Marketing, Mobile, Site Content, Social Media , , , , , , ,
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How to make it all come together

June 25, 2011 — 1 Comment

Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.

The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade.  However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more.  Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing.  Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.

The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors.  Last month they had a total of 16,498.  For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year!  Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine.  So what made the difference?  There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.

WordPress

We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things.  It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design.  Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix.  Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:

Content

This is the big key.  Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events.  They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.

Social

I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right.  Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses.  They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.

The key here is that they work hard at it.  People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily.  We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.

The Little Things

Little things can add up too:

  • We didn’t put our name in their footer in order to help them rank as well as possible in Google.  The results above speak for themselves.
  • They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
  • They trusted us and we trusted them.  When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us.  When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
  • We used most of my favorite WordPress plug-ins, plus a few others to help add additional functionality to the site.
  • We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.

The magic solution

People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way.  A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.

Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time.  Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!

In Analytics, Marketing, SEO, Site Content, Social Media, WordPress , , , ,
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Content is still king

February 4, 2011 — Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I decided to take the family on a Saturday trip to go horseback riding in the north Georgia mountains.  The girls have wanted to do it for a while, and the weather was going to be beautiful that Saturday.

Not really knowing what I was doing, I started searching for places in north Georgia that could help us.  I wanted info, such as:

  • What does it cost?
  • What do we wear?
  • How do I make a reservation?
  • What experience level do we need to have?

Things like that.  Also, our youngest daughter is just four years old, so I needed to find a place that could accommodate her as well.

Let’s take a tour of some of the websites I found when searching for horseback riding in north Georgia and see what kinds of issues we run into…

The sites

Blanche Manor — I found this site early on, and it did a nice job.  Their FAQ page answered all of my questions, including the age issue.  Since they could handle children that young, I expected to have a lot of options with other sites.  The site wasn’t beautiful, but it was adequate.

Dillard House Stables — Decent info, though everything is hidden behind a masked URL so I can can’t quickly link you to a specific page on their site.  However, they clearly stated the minimum age (6), so I moved on.

Adventure Trail Rides — It had potential, but I couldn’t find age information on the site.  I emailed them with detailed info about what I was looking for, including asking about the minimum age.  I’ll post their entire reply below:

7

Wow, weak. No “thanks for contacting us”, or even a name.  Just “7″. I obviously wouldn’t have used them this time anyhow, but that kind of response assures that I won’t use them in the future either.

Brasstown Valley — They have a very nice looking site, but the minimum age is six.  The only real problem with their site is the Facebook account that they promote all over it — it’s a profile, not a company.  Ooops!  They’ll be back at square one when Facebook decides to delete this fellow named “Brasstown”.

Gold City Corral — Auto-playing, un-mutable music.  Ahh!  The whole point of this splash page seems to be to pile a bunch of keywords on the home page, as they clearly say “skip this section and click on the above ‘Enter Here’… to enter our website”.  Cute.  Once you get inside, there is painfully little information, but I already made my choice about them when they shocked me with that awful music.

Why so bad?

There were certainly others that had decent sites, but none that could handle a four-year old.  I couldn’t tell you why they don’t, because Blanche Manor had a special seat for her to ride in with the guide and it worked very well.

I should also mention that Blanche Manor responded quickly and completely to my email inquiry, and made things very easy for us.  You can have an absolutely perfect site, but you still need to talk to your customers properly.

As always, the key is content.  You can’t have a 1997 Geocities-looking site, but it doesn’t have to be perfect either.  Stop stressing about which shade of green to use, and just answer your visitor’s questions.  It’s not that hard…

In Companies, Facebook, Site Content , ,
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You’ve gotta give before you can get

September 16, 2010 — 1 Comment

It’s a idea we’ve all heard before: You’ve gotta give before you can get.  Churches often apply it to tithing, many apply to social networking sites like Twitter, but it also applies in a few other areas.

Think back to the move “Miracle on 34th Street”.  Kris Kringle was directing shoppers to competing stores when Macy’s didn’t have their desired toy in stock.  Management was initially furious, but the result was that customers greatly appreciated that Macy’s was really looking out for them, and become even more devoted to the store.

Here’s a clip from the movie that shows that.  The audio isn’t synced correctly, but you should be able to follow along:

Ministers

The same is true of ministers.  I’ve attended a handful of churches in the past decade and found a variety of styles from the ministers.  Some were great friends with neighboring churches, some were like mortal enemies.  Here are two quotes from senior ministers at two different churches, upon finding out that a high school student was attending a program at a different church in the area:

A: “That’s great! I hadn’t seem him in church lately and was getting worried. I’m glad to see he’s plugged in somewhere!”

B: “Why are they going over there?  We need to duplicate that program and try to lure them back!”

In the case of the second church, they spent thousands of dollars on a new program to directly compete with another church just a half mile away.  The program died shortly after.

At our church, the Lead Pastor makes it clear that his primary concern is for the well-being of church members; whether or not they attend our church is completely up to them.

Recently, when discussing the upcoming “Baptism Sunday” that was approaching, he showed a clip of a recent baptism at another church in the area.  It was a powerful clip, and it made that other church look very good.  More importantly, it made the church (as a whole) look good.  The clip was a powerful reminder of the importance of baptism, and the fact that it was promoting another church was meaningless.  Even so, many pastors avoid showing this kind of content during their service, for fear that it’ll make people want to attend the other church instead.

Here’s the clip, if you’re curious:

Websites

The same holds true to websites.  Some sites are afraid to link out to anyone, for fear of losing that visitor.  In fact, the opposite is true; by withholding valuable resources, visitors will be less likely to return to your site at all!

For example, on Google Earth Blog, virtually every post is a story with a link to another site.  I try to find the best information for the readers of the site, and direct them to it.  By always providing useful information, it’s become a very reputable resource for Google Earth news.  The same is try for sites of every genre; the biggest sites are the ones that freely link to the best resources.

Church Websites

So how does this apply to your church website?  That’s up to you.  The main thing is to simply give your users the best possible information, even if it’s not yours. You can do little things, like linking to the website of an upcoming musical or preaching guest.

You could take it even further and link to other churches in your area.  Oak Haven UMC actually has a page on their site that lists other churches in their community, so you can make an informed decision and choose the church that is best for you.

What are some other ways you could use your church website to give more to your users?

In Church, Site Content, Videos , , ,
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How to embed Google Calendar on your site

September 12, 2010 — Leave a comment

It was pointed out to me today that I talk a lot about using Google Calendar on your website, but I’ve never actually showed how to do it.

It’s fairly simple to do, but it can be tricky to find the right options. Google Calendar has a ton of various options and it can be confusing to dig through the menus.

Here is a quick look at how to create a new calendar, give other users the necessary rights to add/edit events, and then embed the calendar on your site. As always, please leave a comment on this post if you have any questions.

Update: This video is now also available over on A Brighter Web

In Site Content, Videos , ,
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Don’t be like a “University Website”

September 6, 2010 — 6 Comments

A few weeks back, the popular comic strip xkcd posted an image titled “University Website“.  It was simply a Venn diagram that showed the difference between what universities put on the front of their website versus what users actually came to their site to find.

Your church site is likely the same way.

In reviewing a handful of church websites over the last week (and checking out dozens of others), I’ve found that many of them carry common traits that aren’t helpful to users.  Here’s some of what I found.

Unnecessary clutter on the front of church websites

  • Links to conference/denomination affiliation sites. Your average church member doesn’t come to your site looking for a link to umc.org, and I can promise that a first-time visitor isn’t interested in that either.  Being proud of your denomination is certainly great, but not as a primary item on the home page.
  • Hit counters. These are a relic of the past; they slow down your site loading speed, draw attention away from your content, and provide no real useful metrics for your church.  Install something like Google Analytics instead.
  • Upper Room devotional. Churches love to put Upper Room stuff on their site.  There’s certainly no problem with that, but not on your home page.
  • Auto-playing music. This isn’t good on any site, but churches seem to be the worst offender.  Never play audio of any kind for a user unless they specifically request it (when they click a video, etc).
  • Big photo of their building. I just mentioned this again yesterday, but I can’t say it enough.  While I’ve always said that a nice “facility” page is a great thing to include so that people know what the building looks like, but people need to come first.  Show smiling faces, not rows of bricks.
  • Online Giving. While you certainly want to make it easy for people to give online, don’t make this too much of a focus.  If you must include it on the home page, make sure it’s near the bottom.  Better yet, put it in a sub-page somewhere so you can keep the home page as clutter-free as possible.
  • Mission Statements. While a focused mission statement is important for a church to have (and follow), it likely doesn’t belong on the home page.  Most mission statements have roughly the same concept (Love Jesus and Serve Others), and they simply add clutter to your page.  I expect to be able to find it when I browse around the site, but consider it carefully before you add it to your home page.

What people really want to find quickly on church websites

  • Service times. They should certainly be on the front page, and ideally on every page (perhaps in a sidebar).  In addition, I should be able to click any of the services that you list and get more information about it.
  • Location/directions. Every page should include information about where you’re located, and that should always be linked to a “directions” page to help people get there.
  • General contact information. At the very least, including phone and email on the front page.  Your full “contact” page should also include your address, Twitter account, Facebook Page, and any other means that might be a useful way for someone to get in touch with you.
  • Staff Members. This doesn’t need to be on the front page, but needs to be easy to find.  A typical location would be a subpage under the “About Us” section.
    • If your church has more than 2-3 staff members, then build out a section devoted to your staff; a page that lists them all, with links to details on every one of them.
    • On the detail page, include a photo, phone number, email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  If I’m new to a church and I know I need to find the youth minister after the service, I’d LOVE to have a nice photo to look at beforehand so I know what they look like.
  • Upcoming Events. Include a few upcoming events on the home page, and link each one to more details.
    • Don’t tell me “Bible Study on Wednesday at 6pm”.  For who?  Where is it?
    • If you tell me “Men’s Bible Study on Wednesday at 6pm in the Fellowship Hall”, I still expect a link for more details.  What age men?  Where is the Fellowship Hall?  Always provide a link with more information.
  • Sermon Series. Some people (especially existing members) will come to the site to learn about the current sermon series, or to download notes or MP3s from recent sermons.  A quick blurb or icon on the home page with a link to more info is usually a good idea.

What did I miss? Anything you find particularly annoying on church sites?  Anything that is often missing?

In Analytics, Church, Site Content , , , , , , , , , ,
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Seriously, your church isn’t made of bricks

September 5, 2010 — 1 Comment

I talked about this four years ago, but feel it’s worth mentioning again.

If you ask most someone: “Tell me about your church“, they’ll usually reply with something like:

Our church is full of God-loving people, we’re friendly to new visitors, we have wonderful music, we have an excellent pastor, we have a passion for missions, etc…

On the flip side, how often do people answer like this?

Our church is covered on three sides with red face brick, and on the back side with HardiPlank siding.  We have Chelsea Green asphalt shingles on the roof, and we’re hoping to re-surface the parking lot soon.

The answer is never!  When you talk to people about their “church”, they know that you’re asking about the congregation.  However, so many church sites feel the need to feature their building as the primary image on their home page.

For Example

I Googled for local churches to find an example, and came across Holy Family Catholic Church.  Not to pick on them, but they do this worse than most.  They have eight different pictures on their home page, and none of them have a single person in them!  In case they (hopefully) change that in the future, a screenshot is on the right.

I saw another site that featured rotating images of their church sign and all of the cute slogans they put on there.  While I’m sure the congregation thinks it’s neat, it’s not helping very much with a first time visitor.  I doubt a non-believer ever came to a church because their sign said “Stop, drop and roll doesn’t work in Hell“.

The solution is very simple; just put some smiling faces on there.  Rotating images are great too, but be sure that it’s not just a black hole for non-Flash browsers (such as the iPhone and iPad).

Your Facility

That being said, I think it’s important to have photos of your building on the site.  In fact, most churches should devote a section to “our facility”.  There are two reasons for this:

  1. If I’ve never been to your church and I don’t know what it looks like, I’ll feel more comfortable trying to find it if I can see what it looks like.
  2. Churches often say things like “the Bible Study will meet in room B-124“, or “join our prayer meeting in the Chapel“.  Where is B-124?  Where is the Chapel?  This is more of an issue for large churches with multiple buildings, but it’s always good to provide as much information as you can.

Just be sure to put that somewhere off the home page (typically in [About Us] –> [Facility] or something like that) and you’ll be fine.  Use that valuable space on the home page to start giving people a sense of kindness and personality about your church.

In Church, Site Content , , , , , ,
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Church Website Review: San Jose Christian Reformed Church

August 26, 2010 — 2 Comments

Here’s the last review I’ve got for now: San Jose CRC – http://www.sjcrc.org/

If you’d like for me to take a look at your site, just contact me and I’ll be happy to help.

Check out the review below, and leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for them.

In Church, Site Content, Site Reviews, Videos , , , ,
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Church Website Review: Mt. Zion UMC, Grandy

August 25, 2010 — Leave a comment

Here’s our next review: Mt. Zion UMC, Grandy – http://www.mtziongrandy.org/

I again referenced my “page titles” post, which you can find here. Now the review:

Any other ideas for them?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

In Church, SEO, Site Content, Site Reviews, Social Media, Videos , , ,
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