The Coolest Church WebSite, Ever!

I love parody. Yes, even church-inspired parody. I even like it when I’m parodied, but only if it’s very well done. Case in point: The First Baptist Church of {unidentified}, one of the coolest of cool church websites. A site created some time ago by webservant Don A. Elbourne, who actually runs a very usable and accessible website for the Lakeshore Baptist Church, Lakeshore, Mississippi.

What makes The First Baptist Church of {unidentified} parody so funny is that every element Don employs on the page represents a topic I’ve written about at one time or another. Here are just a few I could find in the short time between wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes and explaining to my youth pastor “no really, this isn’t the way we want to go ….”

• My personal feelings about faith aside, there are some serious technical issues about this site that need to be addressed – and healed. First and foremost, the evil animated .gif background image.
• Holy Mystery Meat ! – graphic navigation should be about giving the user a clue, not an online game.
• … the majority of the people who use the Internet are purpose driven. That is, they aren’t generally looking to be entertained or wowed.
• don’t be fooled into thinking that ‘resizing‘ the image with the height and width attributes of the <img> tag will make your images load faster. They won’t!
• Holy Jesus Junk! – remember when as Peter rebuked Simon Magnus for employing cheap tricks?
• … [fix] the <title&gt tags on the sub pages so they say something a bit more descriptive than “Untitled Document.“
• Lorem Ipsum == Check Your Title Bar – its okay to use dummy text, but only for testing.
• .. sub pages suffer from irregular use of font color, such as fire-engine red on their “Favorite Links” page, all bold and all centered fonts on their dated “What’s New” page.
• Scan Me NOT! – always use text to represent text.
• Instead, we get church and para-church websites so chuck-full-o-junk that they drive people away even before all the spinning animated gifs and cheesey MIDI files can load.
• Evil Marquee Tag – If it’s so darn’d important, then say, don’t spray it!
• I am commanding you, my faithful followers, to bookmark the Web Page Analyzer page …
• It’s not just what you say … … it’s How you say it!

Giggles and grins aside, this parody preaches an important point: anything that gets in your user’s way should be crucified.

In fact, about the only things I can think that are missing from this hilariously good example of bad web design are:

• Under, there outta be a law … – pop-up and pop-under ads are nothing less than the spawn of satan.
• Disabling the Right Click – doesn’t stop anything except honest users.
• Page Transitions, or Swiper no Swiping! – the article that inspired the healing of the now very cool Burtonsville Baptist Church. (good job Frank)

How about you? Did you find anything else on top or underneath that someone developing a church website should avoid so they don’t wind up creating ‘The Coolest Church WebSite, Ever!’