Media Outreach

Greetings and salutations to you, my loyal reader(s) on this, the penultimate day in the year of our Lord, two thousand and nine. I bet you didn’t know that a sentence could have that many commas and not violate some unspoken rule of grammar. Actually I may have, but because this is a blog and not a formal article, I can pretty much do whatever I want, or at least what the censors will allow.

Alas, the Christmas season is now behind us, although one might remember that there are only 359 shopping days until Christmas 2010. My role here at faithHighway as a Client Relations Manager affords me the opportunity to answer a lot of questions about websites, and as you might imagine, some of those questions are asked many times from different people. Therefore, over the next few weeks, I thought it would be prudent to answer some of those questions here. My most recent posts have tended to focus heavily on overall best practices, but have been light on specific uses for different areas of the site. To help amend that, I’ll focus on a different area of a site each week over the next few weeks.  This week, we shall dive into the murky waters of Site Navigation.

• One question that I get asked pretty frequently is, “I have ______ page in my navigation… what is it for?” Usually this happens when the person working on the site from the church’s end is not the same person who worked with our pre-production team. In all honesty, I have no idea what you were thinking when you asked for that particular page. I can tell you what I would use it for, but as an outsider I’m not privy to a lot of the specifics about your church that generally influence the site navigation. Therefore, if you don’t have anything to put on a page, use it for something else. Don’t invent content just for the sake of having it. The information on your site on your site should be fresh, well-organized, and above all else, pertinent.
• Another area of navigation that gets brought up a lot is drop down menus. For some reason I’ve yet to determine, some people just really dislike drop downs. Those people often ask, “Do I really need these?” The answer is no. Your site can either have a side navigation on the inside pages for your sub navigation, or it can eliminate the sub navigation entirely by having all the pages on your site in the main navigation bar. However, I remain a strong proponent of drop down navigation, as I believe that ease of use is the most important aspect of site navigation. By utilizing drop down menus, you can ensure that every page on your website can be accessed from any other page. This will not only decrease the amount of time someone spends navigating to a new page, but will make sure that the person never has to hunt around looking for a page. If however you truly despise the concept of drop down menus, then an alternative would be the utilization of a site map. An example of a site map can be seen here.
• I’ve found that when it comes to website, people can find changes they want to make down to the minutest detail (Editor Note: I didn’t realize until just now that minutest was a word). In general though, the pickiest changes tend to be in the site navigation. An example might be changing, “About Us,” to “What We’re About.” The answer to, “Can I make this change?” is yes, you can.  However, to rehash  from an earlier post, you should ask yourself the following before making any change to the site:

1. Will this change have an impact on my visitor’s overall experience?
2. Will this change determine whether or not someone visits my church?

If the answer to these questions is no, then it’s probably not worth doing.

Once again, we’ve run out of time and space, as these posts are generally not supposed to be longer than 1 page in Word. Unfortunately for everyone else, no one said a word to me about font size, so point: Andy. We will continue on with answers to frequently asked questions over the next few weeks. If there are any questions that you have that you’d like to see in this blog, please feel free to email me at andy.grove@faithhighway.com. Until next time then, I sincerely hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas, and that everyone has a very happy new year!

Photo By: mikebaird