[This post is part of a series on Free and Simple Ways to Improve Your Church’s Website]
There are often a lot of small things you can tweak that can make a big difference for your website. In this post I’ll outline a few of those small details that you should be paying attention to.
Small Thing #1: Label Your Pictures
Most of the times visitors to your site will have no clue about the context of the photography on your website. There’s a good chance this is creating confusion for the user. Don’t take for granted that a visitor knows what your pastor looks like, can differentiate the youth service or building from adult service, or understands why there’s a whole bunch of people raising there hands. So if you’re going to feature a photograph that is outside a labeled gallery then give it a short and sweet label in one of the corners. This is also good marketing strategy for your events.
Small Thing #2: Upload a Favicon
Favicon Example
A favicon is a small square icon that displayed next to your URL or when a website is displayed in tabs. Normally they are 16×16 in size so make sure you design an icon that looks sharp when displayed very small. This is a small touch that is a good branding practice and will help users identify your website when tab browsing.
Small Thing #3: Make Your Website Clickable
Whenever or wherever you share your website you’ll want to do so in a way that makes it clickable for users. Sometimes this is as simple as adding the http:// to the front of the URL. Other times you may want to consider using a website like bit.ly to shorten and share your links. Bit.ly will allow you to customize these links and will give you analytics on any shared link. Here are places to check to makes sure your website is clickable: your company email signatures, your Vimeo and YouTube profiles, your Twitter and Facebook profiles, your Google place page.
Small Thing #4: Correct and Update Content
There is nothing more aggravating to a user than content that is out of date, especially your most important information such as location, contact information, staff, and service times. So do whatever you can to make sure you scan sites that have this information about your church to make sure it is current. This is probably good to assign this to someone on your team to do once a month. (Make sure they put a recurring appointment on their calendar.) Go through your website, any associated websites, Facebook, Twitter, Google Page, Google Profile, Google Maps, Blogs, Wikipedia, and so on and make sure all the information is current. Then Google your church and do a scan of the first three pages to see if there are any new sites connecting to your church that need updated information.
What are some other small things churches can tweak that can make a big improvement to the website?
