Six Steps to Better Website

A few of us were sitting around some days back, talking about what makes a good parish Web site. Truth be told, out Web Catholic Parish Web Site of the Year competition got us to thinking again after all these years of parish Web site development. What have we learned? What makes a good parish site? Is there any “secret formula”? For starters, we came up with with six ideas to share with you, and we’d welcome your additions—you can post them in comments here.

Before I pass along our six suggestions, I’d like to tell you about a few features that our Web team has prepared for you to help your Web ministry with coming Church events. First is the feast of Blessed Mother Teresa on September 5. All signs point to this woman, whom many knew as a saint, being someday canonized by the Catholic Church. She remains immensely popular. Our annual feature has been a boost to many sites.

There’s also our back-to-school Web feature, where students and teachers can learn about popular patron saints of education, and send e-greetings to celebrate the new school year. There are also great ideas for teachers and catechetical leaders. This year, we've got a new graphic link for the feature that you can put on your site.

Finally, I’d like to remind those parishes that are holding pet-blessing ceremonies in honor of St. Francis’ feast (October 4) to contact our Web team and get your ceremony added to the Pet Blessings 2007 list.

And don’t forget to send your nominations for the 2007 Web Catholic Parish Web Site of the Year. The deadline is September 1. That brings us back to our opening question. What makes a good parish Web site? Here’s our take:

Six Suggestions for a Great Parish Site

         1. Skip the animated GIFs. It’s a tempting trick, but it gets old quickly on your site. It remains there, flailing about, annoying your visitors.
         2. While you’re at it, skip the audio background music. Yes, we all love Ave Maria, but it loses a little something on the midi sounds, and it also gets old after a short time, especially in the repeat format by the second or third loop. And consider your parishioners checking out the parish site from their cubicles at work—perhaps they didn’t know their volume was set on loud. You get the idea.
         3. Did we mention the background pattern, the one making your text illegible? Once again, just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. Better to stick to background colors that don’t compete with the message you’re trying to get people—of all ages and various sight abilities—to read.
         4. Lose the “under construction” signs. They don’t exactly deliver a message of confidence, especially when they are on the site week after week. Wait until your page is ready to publish, then publish it. Then announce the new page on your home page with a link to it!
         5. No crammed-full pages! I admit, this is an ideal for many of us who have so much information. But it you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to read a page, it likely has too much information. Pace yourself and deliver your content in pleasing, digestible amounts.
         6. Do more with less. The best parish Web sites aren’t necessarily the biggest; they are the ones that present what they set out to present in an attractive, simple manner. It is better, in our opinion, to do a small Web site well, than to put in everything you can think of with little care for design or user-friendliness.

Now, tell us your ideas and reactions! Post a comment here!

Comments

[Mark Barthel]

These six suggestions are great! I would add that web designers should be careful of overuse of Flash animations and never ever use a Flash intro page. Visitors to your site are typically goal driven; they want some piece of information from you. Making them click a "skip intro" link to bypass the Flash screen prevents them from reaching their goal and they may simply leave the site altogether before they see the content you have available.

Flash can be a great addition to a site, just use it wisely.

[Dave]

I agree with the last comment as well - loose the Flash and loose the doorway pages that make the viewer look at some graphic before going to the home page. Search engines don't like those pages either which makes your site harder for folks to find from Google/Yahoo etc.

Also, probably the most important aspect is to keep you site up to date! Nothing makes a parish site look more stale than to have calendars and bulletins that are weeks or months out of date. Just commit yourself to 10 or 15 minutes a week to keep things current, and you're certain to have a useful parish website.

[David Temple]

The six suggestions for a better site hold true for all sites, of course, as does the one about flash intros. Also, a home page that is nothing more than a graphic with a "click to enter" tag is deadly.

One suggestion about design ideas is to make sure that what you're doing technically is appropriate for the "user base" - the first parish website I did was in a community that was without high-speed internet (dial up modems and web-tv connections) - this demands that the site be light on graphics or other "bandwidth intensive" content.

Also, pay attention to the capabilities of the site host. My current parish used to be hosted with a company that had very slow servers. The site was created with a "content management system" so that people with limited web-authoring skills could contribute to their own areas (faith formation, KofC, etc.) The problem was that the site was painfully slow to generate pages, mostly because the database server was overburdened. Whenever investing in a new technology, make sure that it works!

Always make sure that site navigation is easy and obvious, and always make sure that there is a "home" link on every page. If a link loads a document, make sure that the user knows that it is doing so; if the browser needs to open a "helper app," system resources are consumed. A lot of low-end pc's may not be very fast and the user may think that the computer has died.

Try to avoid design elements that require a specific browser. In my parish, we have users running IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror and other browsers in a variety of versions.
Things that work great on IE7 may not render at all on other browsers (browser stats are available from your site's web statistics - learn to use them!)

Also - most importantly - if you post photos NEVER identify children by name. Predators are known to look at church sites, trolling for victims. An excellent document for standards for sites dealing with children may be found at the national boy scouts site here: http://www.scouting.org/webmasters/standards/index.html

[Leon Raymer]

There's a bit of a disconnect between the headline and the content. The headline, Six Steps To...., holds the hope of six things to do, while the content is actually six things not to do. How about six thing to do? Here's a start:

1. Build a fluid structure that expands and contracts to accommodate varying screen resolutions from viewer to viewer;

2. Size fonts using em to allow text to grow and shrink based on the viewers default font size;

3. Ensure that all images have alt text for the visually impaired who use screen readers;

4. Strive for accessibility: http://www.w3.org/WAI/

5. Offer a style choice (graphic vs non-graphic) to accommodate dial-up or broadband connections (particularly helpful in rural areas);

6. C'mon, help me out here.

Leon