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Showing posts with label website assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label website assessment. Show all posts
Trinity Lutheran Church Website
The new website is a huge upgrade from what Trinity Lutheran had in the past, and it was a lot easier than trying to get it all done on Wix with the staff. In fact, there's no reason to assume a church staff should be able to create a website. The best bet is to get someone else, like Luthernet, take care of the heavy lifting. The church can concentrate on weekly articles or YouTube uploads. Even Facebook posts embedded in the website.
The Iowa West Walther League Summer Camp Assoc - DBA Camp Okoboji
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| Camp Okoboji |
Framework
The website uses PHP. As the copyright seems to indicate, it's PHP code from 2012. That's not entirely a problem, but some standards have changed in the time since it was built.
Mobile-Friendly
The Camp Okoboji website is not mobile-friendly. That means Google is indexing it lower than competing websites. Here's a link to Google's test results. Those results indicate the website has the following problems on mobile devices:
- Clickable elements too close together
- Viewport not set
- Text too small to read
- Content wider than screen
Other Concerns
There's a lot of content. That makes a rebuild cumbersome. We could do it for around $1000, maybe a little more. I'd recommend contacting the original designer and seeing if they can make it mobile-friendly for less. There's a good reason this website is not included in the web developer's online portfolio. We host sites for $10 a month, too, and they are https, which is the current standard (and also affects searches).
A lot of time has been put into this website, and that content should not be lost if it's upgraded, so I'd be careful with a web designer who wants to start over. We build sites live and migrate all content over, and then we redirect old links. Most web builders just start over and make you work harder. It DOES need to be brought up to current standards, however.
Call Luthernet or a reputable freelance web designer. Or use the contact form on this page.
A Simplified Guide to Church Websites: Purpose, Planning, and Presentation
The Lutheran Care Network Assessment
Framework
The Lutheran Care Network website is built on asp.net. That means it's probably complicated. It also means there's a way for it to be more modern than it is.
Mobile-Friendly
This website is not mobile-friendly. See Google's test results here. According to Google's test, these are the problem's with tlcn.org:
- Clickable elements too close together
- Viewport not set
- Text too small to read
Other Concerns
Many columns, font sizes, and text colors make the website a bit confusing, as do the separated and quite different menus (top and side). Text is not only too small on mobile, but it's too small on desktop, too.
The top menu actually disappears when the links are clicked. Odd. And some pages, like "Benefits to Being a Partner" are missing, and read, "Under Construction." With a website that is obviously older, a viewer wonders how long it's been empty. None of the links under "Support Us" go anywhere at all.
Basically, this is a website that was created with upgrades in mind that would have happened as time went on. But time went on and on, and now the website is no longer waiting for an upgrade but waiting to be retired.
Call Luthernet or a reputable freelance web designer. Or use the contact form on this page.
A Simplified Guide to Church Websites: Purpose, Planning, and Presentation
Embedding a Flickr Album Gets Google Image Hits
This one surprised me, but it's a good surprise. I was searching for "Hope Lutheran Shawnee" in order to see where some of the photos I'd taken were ranked on Google. My goal is to have highly-ranked photos for various churches so that potential clients can see what they can do with one of my websites and a little effort. What I discovered, however, was more encouraging than I'd hoped: among the many photos I'd taken that come up in the search were photos I had not tagged on Flickr but embedded on a website with the description.
You might not think this is a big deal, but it means that you can add a Flickr album to your church or school page, write an article with the right keywords, and somehow Google can figure out that the photos, even without adding descriptive text to the meta tags of the image.
Granted, Google gives the option of viewing the image or navigating to the website. If people just view the image, your site does not benefit. However, it's there, and some people will click on the article rather than just the single image.
This can also be huge for bandwidth. I can store full-size images on Flickr and allow people to download and enlarge them, but the photos on my own website need to be optimized for speed. Plus, my hosting company eventually limits me if too many people are using the website resources, so storing full-size images and video is a bad idea. I've always done video with Youtube, but if Flickr can work for images, that's a big deal.
While Flickr isn't unlimited, its app offers automatic uploads, and the storage is at 1TB right now, so plenty for most groups looking to add some images to websites. When you embed rather than send to Flickr, people are encouraged to engage with your website, and that's where you want them. Not on Facebook or Flickr or Youtube. Imagine creating a single account that several employees and parents could share, and then having someone organize a few albums for your website.
Good luck. Let me know if you need some help with setting it up. By the way, the photos of Hope Lutheran Shawnee that are on Flickr are the ones that link out to Satisfamily and are of girls basketball.
You might not think this is a big deal, but it means that you can add a Flickr album to your church or school page, write an article with the right keywords, and somehow Google can figure out that the photos, even without adding descriptive text to the meta tags of the image.
Granted, Google gives the option of viewing the image or navigating to the website. If people just view the image, your site does not benefit. However, it's there, and some people will click on the article rather than just the single image.
This can also be huge for bandwidth. I can store full-size images on Flickr and allow people to download and enlarge them, but the photos on my own website need to be optimized for speed. Plus, my hosting company eventually limits me if too many people are using the website resources, so storing full-size images and video is a bad idea. I've always done video with Youtube, but if Flickr can work for images, that's a big deal.
While Flickr isn't unlimited, its app offers automatic uploads, and the storage is at 1TB right now, so plenty for most groups looking to add some images to websites. When you embed rather than send to Flickr, people are encouraged to engage with your website, and that's where you want them. Not on Facebook or Flickr or Youtube. Imagine creating a single account that several employees and parents could share, and then having someone organize a few albums for your website.
Good luck. Let me know if you need some help with setting it up. By the way, the photos of Hope Lutheran Shawnee that are on Flickr are the ones that link out to Satisfamily and are of girls basketball.
The Website Assessments to Avoid
The problem with me trying to help schools, churches, and non-profits with their website design is that many of them probably get dozens of spam emails doing the same kind of thing each week. It doesn't matter that I've already done the assessment, or that I've (in the past) already built a potential website, or that I'm Lutheran and honest. People just see my contact as another spam email. Sad.
Here's an example of a spammer sending an email to ME:
Azad might be a very good guy. He might cost your company half or a quarter what I would cost. (And I'm half than most web guys in America). The problem is that his way of contacting you is wrong and using his skills might not be what your board wants done. And if Azad doesn't do a good job, you have no one to complain to and no way to give him one star to warn others.
Of course, it all still leaves Luthernet, Brave New Church, and Passive Ninja with the problem of contacting you. Even if I've created a valuable website evaluation, people will ignore my emails. When I would sometimes email one small suggestion that was totally free and effective, people would simply not respond. And it's because of Azad and all his friends. I am sorry for them, but you really have to read through some of the emails when you get them. It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out which ones are spam and which ones can help you.
Here's a video that shows how we transformed websites just to try to get customers. We want to work, and we're good at it.
Here's an example of a spammer sending an email to ME:
These website emails are form letters, never mention a real company name (spam is illegal), and often promise more than they can do. Oh, they're almost always foreign companies, too, since American companies can't get away with doing it. I'm not saying that there aren't decent human beings with excellent computer skills in India, China, or Russia. In fact, my old hosting company failed to protect my websites from some of these experts (at least their counterparts who hack).Hi,This is Azad and I am a web design and SEO expert with some pretty impressive skills (not to toot my own horn). I was just checking out your site and it's great, but it can definitely be better and I would like to help you to improve it. My goal isn’t just to build you a website, but help you realize your vision for your business. Would you be interested in getting a proposal for a site redesign or for SEO services?Let me know if you're interested. I'd really love to work on your site. Hope to hear from you soon.Digital Marketing Expert
Sincerely,
Azad
Azad might be a very good guy. He might cost your company half or a quarter what I would cost. (And I'm half than most web guys in America). The problem is that his way of contacting you is wrong and using his skills might not be what your board wants done. And if Azad doesn't do a good job, you have no one to complain to and no way to give him one star to warn others.
Of course, it all still leaves Luthernet, Brave New Church, and Passive Ninja with the problem of contacting you. Even if I've created a valuable website evaluation, people will ignore my emails. When I would sometimes email one small suggestion that was totally free and effective, people would simply not respond. And it's because of Azad and all his friends. I am sorry for them, but you really have to read through some of the emails when you get them. It doesn't take a lot of effort to figure out which ones are spam and which ones can help you.
Here's a video that shows how we transformed websites just to try to get customers. We want to work, and we're good at it.
Christ Preparatory Academy Assessment
This FREE website assessment is for Christ Prep at http://christprep.com. It was completed by Brave New Church Website Services in order to help those who run the program see what can be done to spread their message more effectively using the internet.
Framework
This is a Wordpress website. That's a good content management system. My resources show that it's currently a Wordpress 3.9 site (2014). That's a problem because updating the website to the current version of Wordpress is usually critical for security, but it's also generally not that difficult. Here's the list of missed updates for the Christ Prep website: https://wordpress.org/news/category/releases/ .
Since it's an older website and the admin page is readily accessible, hackers may try to get in and mess up the generally nice website. The website's speed might also be a result of using an older version of Wordpress. I guess it's not a big surprise, however, since Kroma Marketing (the web builder) has a website with a 2014 copyright.
Mobile-Friendly
This website is mobile-friendly, so that's good, and it means that a framework update might be the only concern. However, it's possible this older theme is not compatible with a newer version of Wordpress.
Other Issues
That chance typically lasts about 5 seconds with your website. Having an outdated or poorly designed website can be a detriment to your business both on and offline and may possibly turn customers away.It's ironic because the website I found is not updated and won't even load in five seconds. And the web developer's own website gets a 25/100 score on Pagespeed, which pretty much makes me think they're no longer in business, especially sporting a Wordpress 3.5 website from 2013.
I have to admit that I do not love website speed tests. I think it's OK if a beautiful website loads slow sometimes. But there are some glaring concerns in this particular case.
Some of the speed issues might be about the images in the slider. One was 2.3 mb. That's a lot of data usage for an image I was able to resize to 615 kb without any real loss. I know from experience that image sliders can kill a website's speed.
Read my book A Simplified Guide to Church Websites: Purpose, Planning, and Presentation
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