Scan Me NOT!
I’ve said this before, but Kevin over at the Brown Trout really hit that nail on the head when he said on his blog:
Often, churches miss out on a great use of the web when they do not provide content for their members.
A valid topic of discussion in its own right … go there, read, discuss (you’ll enjoy it it, it is a nicely designed site).
As part of his argument about content, Kevin cites the book of Nielsen, reminding us that church websites should be more than a print brochure. Which got me to thinking, I wonder how hard it would be to find church sites indulging in the cardinal sin of scanning their bulletin and or schedule and posting on their web site?
- New Convenant Baptist Church
- First United Methodist Church of Pacific Grove
- Trinity Convenant Church and Christian Preschool, Lexington, MA
Notice 3 problems endemic with all of the above sites. First the needlessly lengthy load times as most of this content could be presented as text. Second, no links to other areas on the site based upon items in the schedule. Last and certainly not least, notice how quickly such scans go stale. The point is, while this may be easy to do at first - like most quick fixes - it has a very expensive maintenance cost. That is, while it might be harder to establish text context, once done, keeping it up to date is far easier than the ‘scan-your-plan‘ method.
BTW, ending on a positive note, while I found a lot of bad examles, here’s one site that uses scans appropriately - and one I found myself getting lost in rather quickly -Royal Institute of British Architects, British Architectural Library.
