Here is another Fast Five lessons we can learn about good church website design by critiquing not-so-hot church web site design. Today’s candidate is the website for the Victory Baptist Church in Greenfield, IN.
A site whose employment of various ‘gee-whiz’ visual effects is a lesson on how to place stumbling stones in the path of your user’s goals. For example:
- Flash Navigation – why?
- slow loading for the dial-up impaired
- renders simple search-able text as unsearchable .SWF media files
- requires support for those who don’t have Flash installed
- limits the ability for staff & laypersons to simply update the menu
- can kill back-button functionality in some cases
- Animated gifs & other graphic gizmos
- slow loading for the dial-up impaired
- they look and feel cheap
- Page fades, swipes and dissolves
- slow loading for the dial-up impaired
- doesn’t work on all browsers
- gets in the user’s way
- fatigues user’s eyes
- News Page – hard to navigate
- articles should be supported with a ‘search’ feature
- would be nice to have the ability to filter by date
- log in link doesn’t explain the benefit of logging in for user (why bother?-)
- Pastor’s keyboard
- has all the navigational issues of the News Page
- additionally, this should be a blog, or blog supported
Don’t worry, I’ll get back to my more in depth stories, but I figure there’s a better chance at healing more church web sites if I can offer some very quick analysis that’s beneficial both to the subject’s own church website, as well as those of you reading this praying I don’t stumble onto yours!-)
Oh, and remember, we’re in a healin’ mood/mode here so if you have useful suggestions, leave a comment; in love.