I find myself often talking about the importance of good page titles, so I thought I’d get all of the info into one place.

The page title is very important for a number of reasons:

• It was what people see in their toolbar when your site is open.
• It is the default text when someone bookmarks a page on your site.
• It is a very important factor into how well you rank in Google and other search engines.

Keep in mind those three things when creating your titles.  This is not the place to be saying things like “welcome” — use the actual page for that.

My standard suggestion for a church site is to use “church name – city, state – page info”.  Here are some examples:

• First United Methodist Church – Atlanta, GA – Youth Ministry
• Bostwick Lake Baptist Church – Saginaw, MI – Children’s Events
• Mt. Paran Church of God – Marietta, GA – Sermon Archive

You get the idea.  Also, it’s usually best to spell out your church name rather than abbreviate it, as in “First United Methodist Church” rather than “First UMC”.  You want to rank well for “methodist” and “church”, don’t you?

I’d venture to say that close to half of all church websites feature a photo of the church on the front. It’s somewhat logical, but it’s not very well thought out.

Ask any minister “what is the church?” and they’ll almost certainly reply “the people in our congregation” – and it’s true. A church building is just a building, but the people inside are what make it work.

When someone pulls up a church website, they want to know a lot about the people and programs at the church, and very little about the building itself. If you want to use part of your church building as your logo, that’s fine, but make sure the focus of your front page is on people and not the building.

That being said, it’s fine to discuss your building inside of the site. We have a whole section on our site about our facility, so that people can see the various buildings, find their way around, etc.

Show them your church when they come to your site – and save your building for later.

I’m coming across a growing number of church sites (both large and small) that don’t have a search option. Why? I recently changed ours over from the Google-assisted search to one that I built myself using PHP’s awesome “full text search” capabilities. If you have a database-driven site, that is certainly the way to go.

Not only can you control what data is available to be searched, but you can keep a record of what people have recently searched for! For example, I can tell you right now that the last three searches on the Mt. Bethel site

were for “directions”, “wednesday breakfast” (for our youth) and “randy” (certainly looking for Randy Mickler, our senior minister). I can then go in and make sure those items give proper results, and tweak the search engine if necessary. In this case, they all work fine so I’ll delete them from that table so I can keep track of what searches I still need to investigate. However, not everyone has a database-driven site, or the ability to write their own search script.

All is not lost! Google offers a free service that allows you to put up a search box that people can use to search your site. More info about that can be found here: http://www.google.com/searchcode.html

It’s very easy to set-up and it works great, but with one catch – it will only find pages on your site that Google has in it’s index. This means that brand new pages (and occasionally a well-established) page won’t show up. The key to minimizing this problem is to keep your site as well optimized as possible, in terms of how Google (and other search engines) see you. Not only will this help you with the site search, but it will help bring more traffic to your site. We’ll explore church website SEO (search engine optimization) in a couple days.

Happy searching!

When building your church website, you need to assume that you’ll get some visitors that know nothing about your church. As such, you should always offer links to more information when you’re writing content on your site.

The two biggest examples are your facility and your staff. The site shouldn’t focus on the building – the church is about the people in it, not the building they’re in. However, if you mention “This event will be meeting in our Sanctuary”, the word Sanctuary should be linked to a page with more info about your Sanctuary. We have a section in our “About Us” area that has information about all of our major buildings. Each building is on a separate page so that they can be linked to individually. If you visit our worship information page, you’ll notice all of the links. You simply need to assume that people don’t know what your Sanctuary is like.

The same goes for staff members. When you mention a staff member, make sure you link it to a page with more info – not just a quick “mailto:” link. Again, the person viewing your site might not have any idea who “Bob Smith” is, so giving them an e-mail link is not real helpful. The page they land on doesn’t need to be especially fancy. I typically try to at least include the staff member’s name, position at the church, phone number and e-mail address. In some cases, I’ll add a picture and a short bio. To see an example of this, you can view our Katrina relief info page. Notice “Charlie Marus” linked at the top, or “Susan Folger” linked near the bottom.

In my opinion, you should link everything you can. Every time you mention the words “Sunday School”, link them to a Sunday School page. Few things will frustrate a first-time visitor more than wanting more info about something and not being able to find it. Link, link, link!