People might want to print your directions page

I need to go to Dunwoody UMC tomorrow for a seminar, so I went to their site to pull up directions.  My GPS is dead, so I’m having to do it the “old-fashioned” way by looking up directions on-line. 🙂

When they changed to their new design a few years ago, I told them it might be a problem to have everything in Flash like that.  The site looks great and is easy to navigate, but the all-Flash approach is a killer.

For starters, Google can’t read much of it, including the primary navigation.  They’re a pretty large church (over 4000 members), yet Google only has 266 pages in their index.  That is bound to create a lot of missed opportunities.  It doesn’t matter how great your site is if people can’t find it.

Back to my problem — directions.  I found their directions page easily enough and the content on it is pretty good.  The address is always at the top of the page, and this page has both a map and text directions on it.  The problem is that it’s ALL buried in Flash!

I can hover over the map image to view it larger, but I can’t click on it to get a large jpg to print.  Since the text is all in Flash, it won’t print nicely either.  To the right is what their directions look like in the “print preview”.  Helpful, huh?

Also, this text being in Flash once again kills potential Google traffic.  For example, their directions page mentions that they’re near Perimeter Mall.  I doubt many churches can say that, but someone may search for it.  If we search for “church near perimeter mall“, they don’t even show up in the top 100!

This leads to three points:

• If your church is near a major landmark, be sure to mention it on your site, both for the sake of your visitors and for Google.
• If you put information like that on the site, make sure Google can see it.
• Make sure I can print your directions page!

As for me, I just went to Google Maps and printed directions from there instead.  I really just need to get a new GPS.