The new expressions laboratory website is ready for visitors. The company Expressions Laboratory is the proprietor of Church-Box, Nonprofit Expressions, and the Mobile Tech Medics.
Feel free to mosey on over and take a look at: Expressions Web Design and Marketing Company
I have begun work on a blog geared toward do-it-yourself web design and development. If you would like to check out this do it yourself web design blog please visit my personal/professional blog:
The mistakes made when designing websites are sometimes inevitable. But that doesn’t mean many of them can’t be caught and fixed before they happen. Here are some common mistakes you can avoid when working on your website.
1. Flash-based design
This is a sad mistake in web design because flash based sites are often very attractive. Flash based websites offer interaction on a level that a static non-flash site just can’t compete with easily. But there are some real shortcomings with even the best flash design that can’t be overlooked.
2. Animated Gifs/Images
Everyone who was designing websites in 1999 can remember the craze of “animated gifs”. When designers first learned they could make things move on the screen they all went crazy and said “I want that on my site!”. The truth is that now adding any animated gif (except the one that says a page is loading) will make your website look old and out dated. Even if your website is brand new, an animated gif will make many people think your site is old, and this creates instant distrust in your content. The reason a “better looking” website is actually better is the trust it creates in the people visiting them.
I see animated gifs on many Christian websites and I often wonder if the site is ten-years-old. This brings us to our next bad design idea: Clip Art.
3. Clip Art images
Clip art is another example of a severally handicapped design. Many clip art images were created in the early 90’s before the public learned how to use tools like Photoshop. Clip art is as bad as, if not worse than, using animated gif files. If you don’t believe me, go look at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ebay, Amazon, and Facebook. You simply won’t find any clip art on their sites. (These sites are not really even considered current design examples, just very popular).
Now pictures and art are important on your church website. In fact, people respond better to faces and images than just plane old boring text. However, you can find quality art that really makes your site pop at places like: istock photo.
You can also add great appeal to your images by learning to use tools like Photoshop and Fireworks!
4. Background Music / midi files
This mistake is one of my pet peeves. I don’t need to go into great detail, except to say that studies show that when sites play background music, the first thing visitors do is look for the “stop button” on the site or hightail it for the back button. Music might be the quickest way to drive new visitors away from your website.
One good approach is to put music in a place it would make sense to a visitor like in videos and the beginning of podcasts.
Also, music downloads (your church’s worship band or choir) are a great way to offer music on your website. Just make sure it is not the “background” of your site.
5.0 Unreadable Text
This is my unreadable text
When the background (especially images as background or patterns as background) closely resembles the text of a website the text is hard to read. I have spent ten years designing websites and looked at more sites and pages than I can count. Besides one or two occasions I have never ever tried to understand hard to read text-I usually move on, which is what most web users are likely to do.
One way to improve your readability of text is to use high contrast backgrounds. If your background is white, black text will show up very nicely. If your background is yellow, dark red will show up well and so on. If you are unsure if some text is readable try asking someone.
In fact, asking someone else if something looks nice, or sounds good is a great way to improve your church site content every time you update.
In Summary
Church websites are just like any other. They need careful planning and committed people who insist on making them the best they can be. When you are doing work on your church website one great way to avoid making mistakes is to simply stay up to date with blogs like this one. Having a group of sites to read will help you understand the current trends in web design and give you great ideas on content you can share.
Until next time, good luck with your church web design project!
One of the best systems a church website can have is a content management system (CMS). The CMS will allow you to edit your website without requiring a church website designer on staff.
Church Content Management 101
There are many important factors to choosing the right content management system for your church, the first of which is ease of use. One of the best content management systems on the market is Red Dot. This system is very easy to use because it allows you to surf the website and edit your content right from the page where it exists. Red Dot costs over $100k to deploy and is really only an option for large corporate entities with websites that have thousands of pages in constant need of updates.
To find an easy to use CMS, look for one that has preview editing as a feature. This will allow you the power of a Red Dot-type system when making changes. There are many good options for easy to use CMS on the market. The open source community produces Drupal and Joomla. These systems are somewhat easy to use but require a lot of setup and configuration initially. For instance, Drupal can be easy to use with a Red Dot-like system, but the content editor provided is very limiting. Joomla simply is not as easy to use.
Another factor to take into consideration when thinking about an easy to use CMS is the integration of all features. For instance, in Drupal anyone can place an image right into the page but uploading and storing that image, and then linking to it later is quite complex for a non-technical person.
When Church-Box decided on a CMS, ease of use was foremost in our minds. Church-Box is the best cms we have ever used because it is so simple for a complete beginner to understand and use effectively.
Other Considerations for a Church CMS are:
“How easy will it be to leave this CMS behind later if I want to?”
With an an application that uses a database to store your content, the process of migrating to another CMS in the future becomes time consuming and possibly expensive. Don’t get fooled into using a database-driven system!
“Does this application require constant updates?”
Database-driven content applications are constantly needing updates to the database structure. If you use an open source CMS you will need to have someone experienced enough to update it when new security problems are found. For instance, Drupal and Joomla will require updates for security fixes. With church box CMS, the application is housed in a third party location and your website is hosted on your hosting provider. The CMS and the website itself are separated from each other. When you decide to stop using Church-Box (if you ever do) your website will remain intact!
“Will my church website be friendly for search engines like Google and Yahoo?
If people cannot find your church website on Google or Yahoo you may be missing out on new attendees that your website could have drawn in. At the very least when your church doesn’t show up on a search in Google it will keep people from finding your website when they want more information about your church.
Church-Box creates standards-compliant code that is easy for search engines to read and understand as opposed to other CMS that require work arounds and special modules to be search friendly. Church-Box was designed to be search friendly from the beginning!
When you decide to manage your church website with a CMS we hope you will find this article helpful, and Church-Box indispensable.