Faith Lutheran Church

FLC is one of our most recent recipients of our TPS (Template Personalization Service) product. They had chosen the “Travel Portal” template in the building process of their website, using the NE1 Website Builder’s template gallery. They sent us a logo (off of a scanned piece of paper) and provided their own header images. We then graphically embedded them (along with their name and slogan) into the template. The result was a unique website design personalized just for Faith Lutheran Church. Visit their site at http://www.flcnpr.org/.

Druid Hills United Methodist Church

Druid Hills UMC is located in Ocala, Florida. They recently purchased one of OurChurch.Com’s Bundle packages which includes the TPS that we mentioned above. They had chosen the “Worship the Lord” template. They sent us a sketch of their church building to use as the church logo, but then the rest of the design was left up to us. We decided to make the header of the website a little larger so that the logo cold be seen, then we created a dark gray background with some lighting effects to finish it off. Check out their site at http://www.druidhillsocala.org.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Showcase: Faith Lutheran Church and Druid Hills United Methodist Church appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Let’s Share

There is no doubt about it. Social Media is huge! Facebook and Twitter are constantly listed in the Top 10 most visited websites in the world (http://www.alexa.com/topsites). If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. You can do this by adding a simple way for people to share your website or webpage with their friends.

At the top of this post, you will see a Facebook share button and a Twitter share button. When a reader clicks on this button, a smaller window appears that allows the user to quickly post the Title and URL of this web page to their Facebook or Twitter account. Below this article, there is a “Sharethis” image that you can hover your mouse over and choose from several other sharing services.

These buttons and “widgets” can be found in software plugins (such as in Joomla or WordPress) and can also be found as simple snippets of HTML code that you can copy and paste right into your site. Either way, adding these features can turn your website or web pages into a viral traffic generator, which is truly remarkable!

Save All Comments Until the End

While letting your visitors share your information is pretty remarkable, you can give your readers an even more remarkable experience by letting them create a dialog about your website or web page as well. You’ll notice at the bottom of this page, you will find a “Comments” section that allows readers to post their own thoughts, feelings, ideas and criticism on the same page as the article. This allows for 2 things to happen:

1. Readers create a dialog with other readers.
2. Readers create a dialog with the writer of the article.

By allowing visitors to comment on your website, you have a created interaction and intrigue. It’s true that it may open your site up to negative feedback, but this is something that should be embraced. As a business, church, school or any other organization, we should accept negative feedback as an opportunity to improve ourselves and reach out to our readers, showing them that we truly care. This allows not only your website to be remarkable, but your organization as well.

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Searching For

One last feature that you can add to your website to make it truly remarkable is a Search Box. When people want to find something on the Internet, where do they go? They go to search engines. Google, Yahoo and Bing are just a few of the hundreds of search engines that are available online. People type in what they want to find and then they are presented with several places to go and find it.

You can do this with your own website as well. Some web software or content managements systems (such as WordPress or Joomla) have a built in search function that allows visitors to search only that particular website. For example, let’s say that you own an Online Widget Store which has thousands of widgets available for sale. A visitor lands on your site and wants to find the “Widget 2000 X”, but doesn’t know where to click to find it. If there were a search box on the website, they could simple search for “Widget 2000 X” and probably find it within a few seconds, rather than trying to browse through all the pages of widget categories to find it.

For those of you that do not have software or a CMS (content management system) that includes a search feature, Google has actually created a feature called “Google Custom Search” (http://www.google.com/cse/). This will allow you to place a simple search box on your website and then extract the Google search results of certain keywords from your site only. There is a Free version that contains Google Ads, but there is also a paid version that starts at $100/year that contains no ads.

Either way, adding a search box to your site makes it easy for your website visitors to navigate your website and that leads them through a remarkable experience.

What other things have you seen that you thought were remarkable when it comes to website design or features? Please leave your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post 3 Ways to Make a Remarkable Website appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Faith Bible Church

Faith Bible Church, located in Libby, Montana, is a “Christ-centered, Bible-teaching church whose mission is exalting Jesus Christ, evangelizing and discipling people in service for Him, and connecting with each other.” They were fortunate enough to be a winner in one of our contests called the “Extreme Makeover OCC Edition.” As the winner of this contest, they received a Custom Header for the template of their choice. They chose to go with a Flash header with rotating images and animated text. You can visit their site at http://www.libbyfbc.org/.

Heritage United Methodist Church

Heritage United Methodist Church is located in Clearwater, Florida. They are a multi-generational community of believers in the United Methodist tradition growing together under the leadership of Jesus Christ. Their primary focus and audience is young families and children. Because of this, they chose to have an “edgier” website design. They also chose to have a second, yet similar design for the Student Ministry section of their website. Two of the favorite features on their website are their “Sermons Online” section, where visitors can stream audio recordings of past sermons from the website, and the event registration software, which allows the church to collect both information and money directly from the website for upcoming events. These are just a couple of the features that keeps their website remarkable and saves them time in the end.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Showcase: Heritage UMC and Faith Bible Church appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Syosset Gospel Church

Our first TPS showcase is Syosset Gospel Church, in Syosset, New York. They had chosen our “Amazing” template, but then asked if they could design they could replace the entire image that was at the top of the template. They had sent in 2 different images of an open bible and then asked if we could just add their name and a bible verse to it. We did just that and they were extremely happy with the results. You can visit their website at http://www.syossetgospelchurch.com.

Grace and Truth Ministries

Grace and Truth Ministries is a ministry run by Pastor Marty Dickerson. He has placed several of his teachings and sermons into MP3 format and is using his website to distribute these teachings to the public for free. Pastor Dickerson did not have a logo to use, so what we decided to do is design the title of the organization in a way that would represent a logo. The “Heavens” template was chosen and we used a beautiful script font to represent God’s beauty and the wonder of His grace. The end result came out very nice. Feel free to visit pastor Dickerson’s site at http://www.gracereigns.org/.

What do you think?

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Showcase: Syosset Gospel Church and Grace and Truth Ministries appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Get Inspired

One mistake I see over and over again with clients is the mistake of not knowing what they want and thinking up a design “in their head” without knowing what it would look like on their computer monitor. One way to combat this oversight is to look to other websites for inspiration.

The best way to go about doing this is to simply search for it online. If you were a church, you could simply to to http://www.google.com and search for “church web design inspiration” and see what sorts of websites come up. Chances are you will fnd websites that have several different desgn examples to look at.

You can simply take ideas from one or several websites and come up with a great looking layout and unique design elements that will fit your organization very well.

You can also look through general website design inspiration sites as well, to see if any other ideas appear as well.

Get Graphic

One of the major things you can do to spice of the content of your websites is to add graphics to the page. Text is great for information, but let’s face it: text alone is boring.

Not just any type of graphic will do, though. Here are some recommendations or guidelines to go by:

• For every 500 words of text, use at least one related image/graphic
• Try to stay away from “cartoonish” clipart and stick with photos
• Images of people are more interesting than images of objects
• Images shouldn’t take up more than half the page if you are going to have text wrapping around it. If you want a large image, place it on a line by itself
• Stay away from cheesy animated GIF images. Especially ones that “blink”!

I could keep going on forever on this topic, but these pointers are some good ones to start out with.

Get Uniform

One problem I have with some websites that I see is the use of several different colors, font styles, font sizes, etc. KEEP IT UNIFORM, PEOPLE!

If you want variety when it comes to your fonts, you can use different font sizes, such as the use of headers (<h1>,<h2>, etc.) and the use of bold, italic and underlines. There are a few exceptions to the rule, but a good rule of thumb is to not use more than 2 or 3 different font styles and use the 2nd and 3rd font types very little.

When it comes to font color, you want to stick to a general color theme based on the design of your site. Usually you will have around 2 – 4 colors at the most that you would want to use. For example, the OurChurch.Com website has 2 main colors: Red and Beige. You will find that there are other colors within the graphics we use, but for the most part, we stick to only using red or black text (since our background color is light beige).

Hopefully these tips will help you find a way to make your current website more beautiful or maybe even make a decision to redeseign your website in efforts to obtain a beautiful website.

Feel free to post any comments about creating beautiful websites below.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post 3 Ways to Make Your Website Beautiful appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Paradise Leadership Christian Academy

Paradise Leadership University is an academy in Jacksonville, AR that partners with universities, churches and seminary institutions to develop well-round youth that will excel as 21st century leaders.

They currently have only a summer program, but plan to start a year-round program in 2014.

They hired OurChurch.Com to create a Custom Header for their NE1 Website. You can visit their site at http://www.paradisechristianleadershipacademy.org/.

College of Christian Studies at Anderson University

The College of Christian Studies is a department of Anderson University, located in Anderson, SC. They offer programs that emphasize practical ministry training for a new generation of Kingdom leaders. Anderson University is an accredited university affiliated with the South Carolina Baptist Convention.

While being a part of the college, they decided to create a separate website than the website that Anderson University already had. They were looking for a professional look, but with a “grunge” twist to be more appealing to their target audience: High School Seniors.

Their site not only includes a custom design, but many other features such as a custom forms feature, Twitter widget, and more.

You can visit their website at http://www.auministry.com.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Showcase: Paradise Leadership Christian Academy and Anderson University appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

1) Keep Things “Above the Fold”

You may have heard the term “Above the Fold” as a reference to newspapers placing their most important or intriguing headlines close to the top of the front page. Most newspapers are delivered and displayed to customers folded up, meaning that only the top half of the front page is visible. Thus, an item that is “above the fold” may be one that the editors feel will entice people to buy the paper.

This term has been extended and used in web development to refer the portions of a webpage that can be visible without scrolling. Since different users have different monitor sizes, there is no set measurement for where the “fold” is located. Based on research conducted by w3schools.com, most screen resolutions are higher than 1024 pixels wide and 768 pixels high. What this means is that if you can place all of your important navigation links, announcements, news, etc. within the top 600 pixels of your website, your information will be able to be viewed by visitors without scrolling down. A good example would be the OurChurch.Com homepage. This definitely makes things simpler for your website visitors.

2) Minimize Information on the Homepage

One thing that I’ve noticed about some websites is that they try to fit a whole bunch of information on the front page of their site because they feel that all that information is important and needs to be presented up front. The fact is that ALL of the content on your site should be important, but cannot be fit onto your home page is a “simple” manner. It just can’t be done.

Instead, what you need to do is the following:

1. Prioritize – Put your content in order from what would be most the important information for your visitors.
2. Minimize – Based on your priorities, decide what things you can live without, what things can be linked to on another page and what things absolutely need to stay on the homepage.

You may find that linking to information is just as effective as listing it all on one page. You can use creative (and tasteful) graphics to represent different upcoming events instead listing them all out. You can have updates and news scrolling within a smaller sized box rather than displaying everything down the length of the page. There are a lot of things you can do to keep your front page clean and simple.

3) Restructure Your Navigation

There are several websites I’ve seen that have just a few pages on them. On the other hand, I have seen websites that have hundreds or even thousands of pages on them. So how do you keep things simple when you have a lot of web pages to link to?

The answer is to get creative with your menu structure. Rather than a long list of menu items, try to organize your menu items into Menus and Sub-Menus. For example, here is a list of menu items that you might see on a church website:

• Homepage
• Church History
• Mission Statement
• Our Pastor
• Our Staff
• Our Location
• Adult Ministries
• Youth Ministries
• Children’s Ministries
• Senior Adult Ministries
• Sermon Downloads
• Photo Gallery
• Video Archive
• Contact Us
• Prayer Requests
• Events Calendar
• Sign Our Guestbook

Quite a list, right? Well, with sub-menus, we can easily condense the menu down to this:

• Home
• About Us
• Ministries
• Media
• Community
• Contact Us

When a website visitor “hovers” their mouse over each of these menu items, a sub-menu can “drop-down” to be selected. For example, the “About Us” menu can show the “Church History”, “Mission Statement”, “Our Pastor”, “Our Staff”, and “Our Location” sub-menus. A good example of the appropriate use of sub-menus can be seen at one of OurChurch.Com’s Custom CMS clients’ sites, Knott Avenue Christian Church. You may even notice that some of their sub-menus have sub-menus of their own.

With a well-organized menu structure, users will not be overwhelmed with the amount of links to choose from and chances are, if done well, they will know exactly how to get to where they want to be. This will make browsing through your website a lot simpler.

This by no means is a complete list of things you can do to make things simpler on your site, but they are a few of the things that can make quite an impact when applied correctly.

Feel free to comment on these 3 things or even add some of your own in the comment field below.

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post 3 Ways to Make Your Website Simple appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

I’ve outlined 3 of the most crucial features that you or your business should carefully consider when purchasing your next website (or redesigning your current one).

Logo Branding

I believe every business should have a logo. A lot of people that start a small business think that having their own logo is “cool”, but I’m here to challenge that. Having a business logo is a necessity.

If you’re not familiar with branding, let me give you a quick definition:

A brand is a name or trademark connected with a product or producer.

Logos play a key role in branding. Many logos can be made simply out of the name of the company or product (like Coca-Cola or Disney). Others can be an image or symbol (like the Nike Swoosh or Apple’s Apple). Some are simple, some are elaborate. In any case, your logo should be both memorable and complimentary to your identity, tone and service.

Here are a few things to think about when designing a business logo:

• Think Long-Term – Your logo should be with you for a very long time, so make sure that you are happy with your logo. Do not settle for something that you do not absolutely love. You’ll want to pick something you will like, tomorrow, next year and even on the 10th or 25th anniversary of your business.
• Think About First Impressions – Your logo will give new customers a first impression about you and your business. Make sure that whatever you pick, it will accurately portray your identity, tone and service.
• Think About Variations – Your logo may be put on a letterhead or banner. It could be print in color or black and white. Make sure that your logo will look good in any size or color.
• Think Professional – You might have a friend who has created some okay logos. Or maybe you want to go down to the local copy shop. In any case, make sure that whoever you hire to do your logo has a proven track record. Just ask for their portfolio.

Many web design companies (including OurChurch.Com) offer logo creation as a service. This is an advantage since the logo can simply be integrated straight into your website.

eMailing List

With any business (online or off), it is crucial to communicate with potential or existing customers. In a “brick and mortar” business, address can be collected to send specials and updates. Online, businesses can gather names and email addresses.

Many online businesses offer free gifts (downloadable reports, special offers/discounts, etc.) to customers for giving them their name and email address. Once their name and email is received, they can send out specials, announcements, and offers anytime they want. At OurChurch.Com, we even offer an email template designed to match your site.

The advantage to an email mailing list is that you can send out thousands of emails for free. With t postage prices rising every year, this can definitely save a lot of money!

Online Shopping Cart

Billions of dollars are being made online. The businesses that are making this money range from one-man operations to large corporations. One way to offer your products or services online would be to use an online shopping cart.

An online shopping cart or eCommerce store allows businesses to showcase their offerings online and allows consumers to add several products to a virtual “cart”. Once the customer is ready, he/she clicks a “checkout” button and the entire transaction is made securely online.

With OurChurch.Com’s advance shopping cart, you can even send out Virtual Coupons for customers to use. They can enter in a special coupon code that will give them a special online discount.

Having this type of feature allows you to reach out to a lot more customers that you could if you were simply a “brick and mortar” business. Having online capabilities also cuts down on the amount of time you spend dealing with a customer face to face. Your website does the selling and the only time you have to work would be when a sale is made.

If you’re thinking about creating an online store-front for you business, consider adding these things to your website. Creating your brand, communicating to customers and offering alternative shopping experiences can definitely be a very positive and lucrative decision.

[img by lululemonathletica]

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post 3 Crucial Features for a Successful Online Business appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Website Address: http://www.hopeacademyeagles.com/

First Impressions

When I first visited the site, I immediately knew that you were using the Beacon website builder. The background and graphics that come with Beacon are very outdated. I would strongly urge you to migrate to the NE1 Builder ASAP.

Aside from that, the introduction was perfect! Your title, description and the purpose of your website is there at the top. I knew exactly what this page was for as soon as I landed on it.

Your logo may need a little updating as well. I’m not sure if that graphic was scanned or not, but the quality of it is poor. You may consider redoing the graphic so it will be “cleaner” (or having someone with that skill do it for you).

Graphics

As I mentioned above the background graphic, separator graphics, and buttons at the bottom of the page seem a bit outdated. Migrating over to the NE1 Website Builder would alleviate that.

Excellent work with the Katrina photos. It would be more pleasing to the eye to have the photos centered and the text underneath (centering the title and left aligning the description). My wife’s parents live in Mississippi and we know that pictures never can tell the story that Katrina brought to you. we’ll be praying for a quick recovery.

I would have liked to see more photos of the students, teachers, faculty and school building. Pictures tell great stories and give visitors an idea of what they can expect if they were to enroll their children there.

Text

There’s not much to comment on for the text of your site. You may consider using more formatting. Bold and italicize key words, phrases and headings. This will help separate long pages of text and make it much easier to read.

Your Letter from the Principal is a good example. Be sure to separate the paragraphs and give some “white space”. This will help visitors to read it easier as well.

Summary

All in all and as far as the design goes, moving to the NE1 Website Builder would update your site instantly as far as the graphics and template is concerned. It offers a much more professional look. Otherwise, I think there really needs to be more content on the site.

Consider adding a Faculty and Teachers page, providing photos and bios. Create more photo albums of school events. Have your teachers set up their own Classroom sites through the NE1 Website Builder, then link to them from your main school page.

These suggestions, of course, aren’t design related, but would make for a more interesting site for new visitors to look at.

If you have any comments or suggestions for Hope Academy, post them below!

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Critique: Hope Academy appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Website Address:
http://www.cvbaptist.com/

First Impressions

This template is an excellent choice. It is bright and inviting. The photo of your church building is excellent as well. Good quality. However, having some people in the photo would be nice to see as well.

One thing that threw me off was the audio that started playing. When I first heard it, my first thought was that I was going to hear an audio greeting from the Pastor or some other leadership member.

Instead, I heard a conversation about Teens and Sexual Purity. I then thought, “Well, maybe this is a series that they’re going through with the youth group and they recorded one of the speakers at their church or something.”

I scrolled down to see that it was actually a Christian radio station dong a live interview and it had nothing to do with the church at all. My suggestion for this is to not have it play automatically when visitors land on the page. You can place the media player on the page, but make sure that you explain what it is. All I see is “KJIL Radio”. Is this a ministry of the church? Does the pastor have a weekly message on at certain times on this station? Do you have a partnership of some sort? Or is it just a Christian station in the Cedar Vale region?

Text

I believe the size and font for this site is very easy to read. On the front page, though, I would consider left aligning the text that falls below the Scripture (starting with “Dear Friends”). This portion was written like a letter, therefore it should be aligned like a letter.

Also, I’m not sure what your intention was for the layout of the churches address, but you might consider centering the churches mailing address and phone. Also, include the entire address and try linking it to a map page (like Google Maps or MapQuest). It will let new visitors see exactly where you’re located. You can use this URL to link them directly to a page to get driving directions. For example:

Click Here for a Map and Driving Directions

On the “List of Pastors” page, you may want to place the names and dates within a table. This would make it a lot easier to read and see the chronological timeline that you are trying to present.

I think the “Ladies Aid Poetry” page looks great and the centered text is appropriate. You may want to consider formatting the text to where the Author’s name stands out a little more to separate it from the text of the poem. Try Italicizing the author’s name, starting with the word “by:”.

Images

I noticed that most of your pages have images at the very top that are centered. Excellent! Most of them are extremely relevant to the page and are good quality. I would try to stray away from clip art and animated GIFs. These are considered “cheesy” and “out of date”. Try using photos of people. That’s what the church is all about. You may also consider investing is professional Stock Photos for this purpose, if you can find any relevant photos of your own. I recommend iStockPhoto.com.

I did see where of of those leading photos were not centered. To keep things uniform, make sure they are all centered. Keep up the good work on these.

I also saw some image on the front page that lead to external websites. It would be a good idea to create a page especially for links or references and then explain a little about what people will find on these websites and why they are related to the church. The images really aren’t needed, but if you’re going to have images, you might think about taking a snapshot of the website and shrinking it down to make a thumbnail. Taking them off the front page will also make the front page shorter.

Get rid of the counter on the front page. No one uses those anymore.

Media

I saw a couple of videos within your pages. Make sure that these are centered on the page. It is just more pleasing to the eye.

My comments about the audio on the homepage are up in the “First Impressions” section, so I won’t go into that again.

Conclusion

I think overall, this site looks great. The comments above may be a bit “nit picky”, but when I have so little to talk about, that’s what I need to do. One thing you may think about doing is look into investing in a custom header (whether it be static or Flash). It would really complete the site as a whole by personalizing it!

Great job and great ministry!

If you have any thoughts or comments on the Cedar Vale Baptist site, leave them below!

Mike Cotton

Mike joined OurChurch.com as Web Designer/Developer in September, 2006. Born and raised in Houston, TX, he is now married and has 3 adorable children. In his spare time he enjoys playing piano/keys and singing throughout the local area as well as at church. You may also see him acting in church dramas as well as a local Improv Comedy Troupe!

www.ourchurch.com

The post Web Design Critique: Cedar Vale Baptist appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.