Even if you haven’t read the latest writings of Steve Krug, Jakob Nielsen or Luke Wroblewski, it doesn’t take a ‘Jesus Christ Rubber Duck’ to understand that church speak and clique-chat only help relegate your site into the realms search engine obscurity.
Posts under ‘Bad Design Posters’
12 Days of Jesus Junk – Day 4 – Unreadable at 11:23
If conversion rates are the metric by which we measure successful web page adoption, then the antithesis of that is product abandonment. Today’s example shows how something as intuitive as a wall clock was made unreadable at 11:23.
12 Days of Jesus Junk – Day 3 – Avoid Wipeouts
Nothing says “wipe-out” like a cheap little Holy Bible eraser. And nothing spells disaster like having all your valuable data turn into techno-mush. Here’s some tips to avoid this.
12 Days of Jesus Junk – Day 2 – Think Globally!
As once again the TSA reminds us that Christmas Snow Globes a threat to National Security, I thought it might be a good time to talk about the wide-World of bad-guys and some simple things you can do to guard your site from a potentially explosive situation.
12 Days of Jesus Junk – Day 1 – Hallway Testing
Learn how to cheaply and quickly avoid ‘accidental-message-myopia’ syndrome – like inadvertently creating a design that asserts an Aryan baby Jesus.
Bad idea design poster #10 – Feature Creep
The misguided notion that somehow more is always better.
Main Entry: Feature Creep
Pronunciation: \ˈfē-chər ˈkrēp\
Function: intransitive verb
Etymology: Middle English feture crepen, from the act of over-building something
Date: July 24, 2009
Remember folks, flee from temptation to ‘gizmo’ up your site.
Instead, focus on workflow – that is the things your users want/need to do/learn from visiting your [...]
Is Church marketing dead? Nope, just stuck on stupid!
There’s no getting around it, despite the efforts of many to teach, rebuke, correct & train in righteous web design, there still exists a great cloud of witlessness when it comes to the Church’s presence online. A fact painfully corroborated by the persistent body of ‘kitsch‘ out there that distracts, annoys and otherwise drives-away people seeking and/or serving the Lord.
Making a Ready Defense by Planning for Failure
Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. While this aphorism is very worn, it is also very true. Here are some simple things you can do with mysqldump, crontab, tar/gzip and a little contingency planning to insure you don’t lose your sanity when your server crashes upon the shoals of of virtual disaster.
How to avoid high maintenance church website design
For what will it profit a man if his church website is the slickest in the Internet if he has to forfeit a month’s collections just to change the welcome message? If you haven’t guessed by the play on Matthew 16:26 (&/or Mark 8:36, &/or Luke 9:25), or the somewhat wordy “bad church web design poster #006,” the topic of today’s “sermonette” is website maintenance.
Inaccessible, that’s what you are
I find too many church websites putting their best information out of reach. Hence the idea driving today’s bad church web design poster is best sung to the tune of Nat King Cole’s classic, “Unforgettable” followed by my usual pithy enumeration of this pesky issue:
Bad church web design poster 0004 – Mission Statements (suck)
Programmer guru Joel Spolsky reminds us that usability tests often demonstrate that very few users read the words you put on screen. Couple this the fact that 1-in-3 users are un-churched, and I’d venture to say that Nielsen is right – just about nobody reads nuthin’. Instead like wild animals, they just hunt it, scan it, and categorize it in their pretty little pumpkin heads and move on.
Bad Church Website Design Poster #0003 – Pretentious
Nothing shouts at a potential visitor ‘your time is NOT important to us’ than making them have to wait for a pretentious Flash intro. Especially those renderings so gratuitous that they include a ’skip intro’ link. Here’s why:
