Media Outreach

First Impressions is facilitated through Guest Reflections. People are asked to pick a website from a church in their area at random and review it. These sites may or may not be powered by faithHighway.

Church Location: Greer, SC

User Profile:

• Female
• 25 to 29 years old
• Caucasian
• Area Resident 1 to 2 years
• Attends Church 2 or more times per year

Final Grade: Confusing navigation, poor content management, broken links, and unappealing graphics cause this site to fail visitor inspection.

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“The service times, directions, and church contact information did not stand out when the initial page loaded. I scrolled by it twice, looking for text to pop out at me before I started focusing on the individual words. It took five minutes to locate the affiliations information. Regarding the church programs, ministries and material available for children and parents; it seemed that partial information was found on several different pages. This made it rather confusing as I had to flip back and forth from the ‘resources’ page to the ‘connect’ page.”
The visitor found that some pages loaded slowly and encountered broken links and error messages. “The church newsletter link did not work, after trying it twice from the main homage. I was not able to find a store/bookstore access.”
“I did not like the untidy layout and seemingly lack of professionalism when describing the church and what they had to offer. While I was not looking for a stuffy or ultra-conservative site, this website made it difficult to understand what they had to offer, what they believed, and how that would relate to me as a person looking for a new church.”
The visitor found the site graphics to be unappealing overall. In addition, the design did not present a user friendly atmosphere for finding information.

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What is your overall first impression of this site?

“My initial impression when the website opened was a sense of confusion as to where to click and read. The page was primarily white, with snippets of text, but not with any clear dividers. It took several minutes of glancing around to determine where I would want to go, and what I was interested in reading. It had the feel of a personal blog.”

What would make this site better?

“A professional, clean slate in which to put the data about the church and what it has to offer. Having all the information about children, teenager, and adult ministries on one page. Linking that page with the ministries with the online calendar. Having the blog writings, on a seperate page, not the opening page of the church website.”

Would you visit this church based on the site?

“Definitely not.”

faithHighway Tips for improvement…
…from a design expert:

“This website is very information-heavy, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  If this much text is really necessary though, it should be broken up in a way that makes it easy to skim through.  Use large, bold text for headings, smaller text for content to make the information easier to digest.”

…from a programming expert:

“The site url is actually displaying an iframe of a third party blog application. As you navigate through the website the domain url does not change.  This causes a problem for web searches, and really devalues their website.  Instead of using an iframe, the domain should just be pointing to the blog directly.”

…from a web outreach expert:

“The homepage needs to have more balance. The left column is extremely long, and the main content area does not extend as far. It makes the homepage very unbalanced. Finding more balance would be beneficial.”

Photo by IkkoPykko