Church Web Site Annoyances

There are few things in life that truly annoy me; I’m a pretty laid-back person. Just ask anyone who knows me. But there are a few things I run across on some church web sites that really do annoy me. This article highlights some of the things that annoy me about church web sites in hopes that there will eventually be fewer church web sites that annoy me. But don’t just take my word for it; do some research and you’ll find that I’m not alone.

Annoyance #1: “Under Construction” Pages

You know what I'm talking about - those pesky “Under Construction” pages or messages that occupy web sites or web pages that are not quite finished yet. Nothing annoys me more than following a link to a page, only to find out that there’s absolutely no content on the page. It’s almost akin to false advertising - you’ve promised me some sort of content about the link I clicked, and now you’re not delivering on your promise. I want to know what you HAVE, not what you DON’T have!

I did some research one day a while back and found one church in our conference (names have been withheld to protect the guilty) that has a home page, and 19 out of the 21 links on that home page go to an “under construction” page. Very annoying. They do provide a form on that page that claims to inform you via email when the page is complete, although I’d be weary about giving out my email address to any web form that asks for it (see spam articles on this site). Plus, when 90% of your links are not finished yet, I’d wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting.

You wouldn’t think about releasing a printed newsletter that was not complete. If there were nothing to report about the youth that week, you wouldn’t put a big “YOUTH NEWS” heading and then have absolutely nothing under it, would you? Well, when you provide a link on your web site to “Youth News” and then direct people only to an “under construction” page, you’re doing exactly the same thing.

If you have pages on your site that aren’t quite ready for public consumption, then don’t link to them from other pages on your site. ONLY link to them when they are complete and ready for the public to view.

Annoyance #2: Frames

What Are Frames?

A frame is a construct which serves to segment the user’s browser screen into different sections, each with its own web page. See an example here. One common use of framed pages are for a menu on the left of the page and content on the right, which can scroll independently of the menu. Sometimes a third frame is used for a header.

So What’s the Problem With Frames?

It may seem on the surface that frames are not a big deal, but there are several reasons why you might not want to use them on your web site:

1. Search engines find “pages” (the stuff inside the frames), not “framesets”. This can cause a problem with someone coming to your page form a search engine like Google, only to get to Page 2 by itself, and have no frame of reference (pun intended) for how to get around in your site, because the menu frame is not there. Some search engines (Yahoo! included) will not even list framed web sites.
2. Links, text and/or images that go beyond the height/width of a frame. Look at the menu in the example. I’ve included a link to www.webevangelism.com on the menu frame. Notice how it gets cut off because of its length. This can be fixed by carefully adjusting the width of your frames, but it looks very unprofessional when text/images get cropped in this way.
3. Links that show pages inside the wrong frames. Go ahead — click on the “NIC Home Page” link on the menu frame in my frames example site. Do you notice something wrong with where that showed up?
4. Frames that do not allow you to scroll. Many times, people will turn off the scrollbars on header and menu frames. But what happens in the case of #2 above? The text/image gets cropped, and the user will never see the rest of the link text. You can never be entirely sure of the browser window and/or text size with which a user is viewing your site; you must be very careful about how the information is displayed.
5. Referring users to and/or bookmarking a page. When a user browses through a site that uses frames, the URL in the Address: bar on the browser never changes. Go ahead, browse through my frames example site, and notice how as you click on different links on the menu, the address at the top of the browser stays exactly the same. If a user wants to reference and/or bookmark a particular page on your site, they can only bookmark the main frameset, which includes only the main page, not the content for page 2, page 3, etc… This becomes quite problematic.
6. Improperly displaying other sites’ pages inside your frames can lead to legal issues. Yes, you heard me right. If you have a link in your site that loads someone else’s site inside one of your frames, the user can mistakenly interpret that site’s content as your own. This can lead to a charge of copyright infringement.

These are only a few annoyances/problems with using frames on a web site. At the very least, if you feel like you must use frames, be very very careful about your implementation of them. If you aren’t, you can end up driving users away from your site.

Resources

If you want to learn more about why you might not want to use frames, visit these other resources:

• Frames are Evil
• Are Frames the Work of the Devil?
• Do Frames Make it Harder for Search Engines to Properly Index My Site?
• To Frame or Not To Frame?
• Internet Legal Issues: Framing

Annoyance #3: Neglected or Abandoned Web Sites

I paid a visit recently to 82 church web sites as listed on the North Indiana Conference “Church Locator” pages. Of the 82 web sites, almost 20% (16 churches) had not updated any of their content in over a year (some for 3, 4 or 5 years)! How do we expect people to visit our web sites if we don’t take the time to update them?

Many sites have a tag line at the bottom that says “page last updated [date].” I’ve observed pages where that date is several years ago — even into the 1990’s!? Even worse are sites which advertise events which happened 2 years ago. This is not helpful to anyone.

Old Web Sites

Some churches, however, have run into a problem where a former pastor or church member created a web site for the church several years ago. Then, that person moved on and didn’t bother to leave anyone at the church the password to get into that site and update it. This is an especially prevalent problem in United Methodist churches, where pastors tend to move from church to church more frequently.

Sometimes, the church has created an entirely new web site with another host that is kept up-to-date. However, that old site may still be there. So what is the problem with leaving an old site online? Search engines are still indexing that site, so when someone does a search for your church, that old outdated site may still show in the results.

Many times these old neglected sites (at least for United Methodist churches) are on GBGM’s free web space. If this is the case, you can email webhosting@gbgm-umc.org to try to resolve the issue. If the site is hosted by another web hosting company, then you’ll need to look up their contact information to try to resolve the issue.

The Moral of the Story

If you are going to establish a web presence for your church, it is imperative that you have a team in place to maintain the site and keep the content fresh and up-to-date (see my post about web teams). I have repeatedly shared with churches the following axiom: It is better not to have a web site at all than to have one and never maintain it.

Annoyance #4: Pictures

This annoyance is not that you HAVE pictures on your church web site, but WHICH pictures you have on your church web site, or the entire LACK of pictures on your church web site.

Too many church web sites have absolutely no pictures or photos whatsoever on them. All text is fine for bulletins, but NOT for a web site. The internet is a visual medium. There is nothing more boring for web surfers than a web site composed of all text. And if you combine a pictureless web site with content that hasn’t been updated in over a year — Egad!

What NOT to Include: Church Buildings

When someone looks at a church web site’s home page, whatever takes up the most space on that page is what will be perceived as being the most important thing to that church. What are we saying about ourselves if we have a huge picture of our church building on that page? A unchurched person would perceive that our church building is more important to us than the people that are in it.

Too many church web sites have a big picture of their church building on their home page. A picture of the church building might be fine on the page which gives directions to your church, as a visual cue for the first-time visitor, but not on the home page. If you really are trying to make your web site an evangelistic tool to attract people to your church, then you must make that person feel like your church is a place they would want to visit. While I can appreciate the fine architecture of many church buildings, I fail to see how looking at a picture of your church building (no matter how beautiful it is) will attract anyone to your church. (By the way, the same thing applies to pics of stained glass windows, too!)

What to Include: People!

So what should you include? Photos of people! The church is people, not buildings. So why do we keep promoting our buildings on our church web sites? We should promote the real church — our people. Go around to some of your church events and take photos or real people doing real things. Build up a collection of photos that you can use not only for your web site, but for other purposes as well. Unchurched people looking at your web site will want to see that your church is full of real, geniune, authentic people that are just like them. That’s why you should include pictures of people throughout your web site, not just on the home page.

Be Careful, Though

One of the sad realities of the culture we live in is that you must be careful when placing photos of real people on your web site. If a photo is close enough to have easily-identifiable faces in it, then you should get written permission from every person in the photo to include it on the web site. You should also NEVER include names or other personally-identifiable information with pictures of minors (children or youth). It is also especially important to get the permission of the parents or legal guardians of a minor to include their child’s picture on your web site.

If you are too worried about including photos of real people on your site, then you might consider using stock photography. There are many web sites that offer stock photographs at reasonable prices. Just Google “stock photography” and you’ll find lots of places willing to sell you photos.

The Moral of the Story

In my article about avoiding Christian Jargon, I mention that a good evangelistic church web site should cater to three distinct sets of people: 1) church members, 2) Christians in the community looking for a church home, and 3) non-Christians. Most churches are good at #1 and #2, and leave #3 completely out in the cold. The use of photos of real people is one small way that we can make our church web sites more attractive to non-Christians. It’s a small thing, but if we combine lots of small things together to make our church web sites more attractive to unchurched people, then it becomes a big thing — a tool that can effectively reach people where they are and bring them to our churches.

Annoyance #5: Music on Church Web Sites

I understand that the Internet is multimedia. I understand that sound is a major part of the multimedia experience. But nothing annoys me more than the invasion of sound when I’m not expecting it. Many church web sites include a midi version of some hymn (which automatically starts playing when I visit the site) for me to enjoy while visiting their site. Even worse yet are web sites that provide this music for me, yet provide absolutely no way (or no EASY way) for me to turn it off. There are several reasons why this annoys me:

1. Most of the time, the sheer quality of the midi files is just bad. There’s no other way to put it. Being a musician, I may tend to be more critical of the quality of the music I hear, but some of this stuff is just plain awful.
2. Imagine this scenario: I’m a seeker out there surfing the web, listening to my music on iTunes, when all of a sudden I come to your church’s web site and get that awful midi version of a hymn blaring at me. The first thing I’m going to do is leave your site because I can’t take it any more. And I don’t know about everyone else, but when I listen to my music on iTunes, it’s not at a low volume level.
3. If you’re trying to reach non-Christians with your web site, do you really think they want to hear a hymn while they’re browsing? I’m not debating the theological merits of hymns, but hymns are usually not something that’s going to attract non-Christians.

I might expect to hear music when I visit a musician’s web site, but usually not when I’m visiting church web sites. Putting music on the web site is usually something that a church does “just because they can” or “because it’s neat.” But just because you can do something, doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do.

However, if you feel like you absolutely must put music on your web site, at least provide a CLEAR, easy-to-use way for the viewer to turn the music off if they wish. My personal preference (and of many people that are web savvy) is that you just forget the music altogether. If you would like to promote the music of your praise band, then do that on a separate page within your site (and watch out for copyright issues!). Many churches also provide podcasts of their sermons and/or other special events.