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: San Marcos, TX
User Profile:
- Male
- 18 to 24 years old
- Caucasian
- Area Resident 3 to 5 years
- Attends Church 2 or more times per month
Final Grade: 
While this site functioned well and the graphics were appealing, confusing navigation and poor content yielded a below average grade.
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 “The numerous inconsistencies, typos, and awkward formatting bring down the overall quality of the entire site. The welcome message is buried in a scroll box on the homepage. It should be able to be seen at first sight of the homepage to provide a more welcoming atmosphere to the site. There was no page stating the church’s views on core Christian beliefs.” |
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 Our visitor found no broken links or major functionality issues. However, he did say, “The map on the directions was very poor. It was not to scale and roads are not going the right direction. A Google Maps graphic could be embedded in the page. That would serve a lot better.” |
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 “Though as one starts to dig into the site and read the inner pages of the different ministries, etc, many inconsistencies show up. These inconsistencies include; awkward and confusing formatting, typos and grammatical errors, links to major pages that are not easily found or are inconvenient, changing color schemes, and buggy animations.” |
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 “The pictures are tailored for each page and provide a quick visual of the subject on that page. The pictures also show a sense of community and constant activity. The color scheme is very warm and calming. The general look of the site with the flash slideshows and clean layout give a very professional look to this website.” |
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What is your overall first impression of this site?
“The first thing that I saw was the flash slideshow of tranquil pictures. This portrays the idea of a peace that the church tries to provide. The layout appears to be very clean-cut. The color scheme is very warm and calming. There are pictures of children smiling giving a sense of family and community. My eye was almost immediately drawn to some link graphics that appear in the very center of the screen. They are links to Facebook, Twitter, and a major program at the church. I found these graphics to be placed in a very unnecessary spot on the page. They are in a very small scroll box in the middle of the page. At the bottom of the scroll box is the welcome message that cannot be seen on first sight of the page. It is buried in the scroll box. Basically, there is no welcome text (that can be seen) when the page first loads up.”
What would make this site better?
“A page-by-page proofread would be necessary to correct any of the inconsistencies that I have mentioned. The site would greatly benefit from a statement of faith and beliefs. The ‘Join the Journey’ links on the homepage need to have a place in the main menu bar as well. Get the welcome message on the homepage out of the scroll box and into plain sight. Give the other church leaders bios and pictures. Visitors want to learn about all the church leaders, not just the head pastor.”
Would you visit this church based on the site?
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
faithHighway Tips for improvement…
…from a design expert:
“This site seems very small. It looks like it was optimized for an 800×600 resolution screen, but less than 4% of monitors are still set that low, and most of them are not being used for web browsing anyway. Also, the home and inside pages have different colors, which tends to throw a lot of users off.”
…from a programming expert:
“The Menu is appearing behind the flash video, and the Calendar link and the Events link are both linking to the same page, which can be confusing.”
…from a web outreach expert:
” I would consider a new domain name. Using abbreviations can often lead to confusion and navigating to the wrong place. Also, .org and .net are available for the current domain, so at the very least, those should also be added.”
Photo By: Takomabibelot
December 17th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
From an SEO standpoint, what was google supposed to scan on this site?
December 17th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
That's a great question Justin. And as an answer, I would say it's not really clear. There's not much on the homepage by the way of content that would be very meaningful to Google. But your question got me thinking….
What if this design, as is, had great, meaningful content… for Google… not the end user. Does that really matter? Maybe it's philosophical, but it's kinda like a tree falling in the woods… Just because Google thinks your site is great in the rankings, does that mean it's going to be effective to bring people to your church or communicate the information to your members effectively? Hmmmm, I smell a blog post coming….