You know the gyms are going to be crowded at this time of year, but what kind of shape is your church website? Follow this quick-fix checklist to make sure your parish looks its best before you head out into 2012.

1. Do you still have Christmas graphics up after the Epiphany? Now’s the time to take them down before you end up looking like that neighbor who leaves Christmas lights up all year.
2. Has anyone asked any of your Frequently Asked Questions in the past year? Are the answers still accurate? You might want to check the freshness of your “About Us” page, too. (Here are some good About-Us examples from the business world.)
3.  Is your domain name expiring this year? Renew it before you risk losing your entire site.
4.  Did you add any new social media accounts in the past year? Make sure all of them are listed on your site and in your marketing materials. Reorder the list if you are more active on some than others. And confirm that you are using consistent imagery and descriptions across all of these networks.
5. Got the wrong copyright year at the bottom of your website? That’s oh so 2011. Here’s how to fix that problem so your site automatically updates each year. If your site runs on PHP, use this line of code (without the spaces):

   &Copy; Copyright < ? php echo date ( ' Y ' ) ; ? > Your
   Business Name or Site

   This will give you:
   © Copyright 2012 Acme, Inc.

   this year and next year the 2012 will automatically switch to 2013.

   If you don’t have PHP, you’ll need to resort to JavaScript.

   Copyright &Copy; <script type="text/java script">
    document.write(new Date().getFullYear());
    </script> Your Business Name or Site Name

   And remember, you can copyright your content but copyright law doesn’t protect domain names.

6. Do your “contact us” forms still work? Fill them out, submit and then check that the confirmation message remains relevant and that the message reaches the proper inbox. And if these submissions go to someone other than you, it’s a good opportunity to see how fast your parish staff or designated volunteer replies.
7. Repeat step 6 with your online donations forms. (Actually, that’s a good one to check before the end of the year. Sorry about that!)
8.  Did any of your parish policies change, such as how you register as a parishioner or timelines for wedding and baptism preparations? Update your site and remind your staff accordingly.

Those are some key items to get you started on reviewing your parish website. So, what are you doing for your church to look good in the new year?

(Note: I wrote a small business-focused version of this article for NFIB that appeared as New Year Checklist for a Good Looking Small Business)

Examples of Copyright Dates on Church Websites

Wrong year on StCharlesChurch.org

StJohnsTipton.com avoids the issue by not putting a year in its copyright notice.

Mary.org's great site needs to fix that 2007 copyright date.

SMIP.org shows 2011 in January 2012

CrossintheWoods.com shows the previous year's date.

See this post for related coverage.

Update: November 14, 2008, 10:37 PM ET.
The St. Mary’s of Greenville site is unavailable as I write this so many of you are coming here looking for more information. Try these links:

• AP Story: SC priest: No communion for Obama supporters (AP story)
• Fr. Newman’s letter to parishioners (from the Google cache/last snapshot of site before it went down)

I’m guessing St. Mary’s site is unavailable due to a surge in traffic, but I have not yet heard back from one of my webmaster contacts there.
Thank you–Mark
[Update from Nov. 15, 2008: Port 80 was closed intentionally to give time for the Diocese to regroup.] 

OK, back to the original review from January of 2007…

You don’t have to wonder this month why St. Mary’s of Greenville, South Carolina is American Catholic’s website of the month. One look at this site’s beautiful layout and gorgeous pictures will inspire you to explore the clearly displayed main content areas and to read the fresh news. Let’s take a closer look at the many elements of church site design St. Mary’s does right that you may want to try on your own site.

• Weekly message from the clergy — the site highlights the weekly pastor’s column from the bulletin so that a new and topical message is ready each week. He’s writing it anyway so getting double duty is a great idea.
• Clear links and main sections across the top — First time visitors can immediately orient themselves finding essentials including location, directions, bulletins and ministries. Established parishioners can easily get to what they need. And all visitors will enjoy seeing the most popular pages listed on homepage. A little overuse of my browser’s reload button reveals that the count of page visits is indeed updated on the fly (although “views” looks to be a more accurate description than “visits”).Traffic-ranked content is an effective way to keep the home page new because the counts automatically update and I’ll assume there’s some variety over time. Recommended picks are also prominently displayed for those who appreciate editorial guidance–a good way to promote the inevitable pages that aren’t (yet) popular, but are important to someone on staff.
• Rich, professional quality pictures rotated on the home page — which also appear throughout the site. These aren’t the snapshots or mug shots you often encounter in these neighborhoods. One gripe: only two of the 13 home page photos (#7 and #10) are people pictures, with #7 reflecting an overhead shot when the church looked pretty empty; pick one of your more crowded days, instead, since nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
• Audio versions of homilies — choose from streaming, for listening while on the site, or download as MP3s for listening on the go. Adding a more descriptive title other than the date would make it easier to track down a particular homily and would help with search engines. A transcript would be even better, but a summary or extract would help. Imagine a parishioner thinking, Which homily was the one about the little boy who…. The page includes extensive background information about what a podcast is, although this pushes the homily links to below the fold.
• Parishioner business promotion — St. Mary’s is offering this service for free to active parishioners who want to highlight their businesses online, a nice touch that other parishes may want to offer, perhaps even charging for the service.

So much to love about this site, but one flaw should be corrected: frozen text point sizes. The designers have overridden the user’s ability to adjust the point size of the body text for those visitors who wanted to make the text appear larger (View/text size/larger) when using Internet Explorer (it remains adjustable in Firefox). Bad from a usability standpoint. For a church website, you might even say uncharitable. The design is beautiful, but if someone can’t read the small text, give the option to adjust the size.

Other areas for improvement are relatively minor.

• With so many personal touches, it’s surprising that the bulletins are presented as PDFs rather than as regular webpages. Remember those helpful pastor columns that are already in HTML? To read the rest of the bulletin, which is in two column formats, means awkward scrolling and dragging in Adobe Reader. Yuck. PDFs are for printing. Also, a stray message on the bulletin page needs to be updated because it mentions who to contact for bulletins before 2005, even though bulletins are available as far back as 2003.
• Use text in header formatted with CSS rather than with a large image, to give search engine spiders just a bit more text to consume. Upper left coat of arms/logo isn’t clickable; that would be the most natural spot to expect a link to the home page, similar to how a logo would be used on a traditional site. The rest of the banner is linked to the homepage, which is always a good idea. That is, except on the homepage itself, where this link is redundant.
• The site search engine doesn’t provide an explanation when zero search results; it’s just blank.
• Javascript mouseover – American Catholic liked it, but I wonder if this would get annoying after a while. For some navigation items, it gives you extra information; perhaps this could be done with the title attribute instead to get a tool tip. In other cases, the message mentions a permanent link and then lists a very long blog-style URL with several hyphenated words; but if you try to click, the box disappears; and the URLs are too long to remember. And all your URLs should be permanent anyway. It’s also inconsistent–for the site map, the subcategories get the box treatment, but not the main categories.
• Publication titles are underlined, giving the false impression that they are hyperlinks. Bold, italics or quotation marks would make for clearer formatting.
• Bottom navigation looks like the top navigation, but none of these boxes are clickable…oh wait, the sixth one is and gets a popup box–but the credits link next to it doesn’t Maybe the designers felt modest! (They should be proud.)

Conclusion
St. Mary’s of Greenville is a great looking site with a winning design and many elements you’ll want to consider for your parish or church website. What lesson did you learn?

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• People pictures, not empty building pictures – St. Jerome’s recognizes that the Church is the people, not the buildings, so we see two of the four photos on the home page are of individuals. The photo gallery has more pictures, with a wealth of technical details about the photos; captions about the subjects would be helpful.
  
• Sunday reading reflection questions – a great resource that will keep visitors returning regularly; plus, the site includes these a few weeks in advance, not just one week ahead of time. Not sure why the third page of the PDF is blank, though, for January 7.
• Email addresses for many of the staff; photos would be a nice addition here.
• Podcasts – no direct link, but if you scroll down the Jubilee page you’ll see links to podcasts hosted on libsyn (just watch out for some racy photos that appear randomly on the libsyn home page)

This is an attractive site with its main features clearly listed along the left-hand navigation. Here are a few points that could make this site even better.

• The URL structure should be human and search-engine friendly. In particular, why complicate things by using www.stjeromeonline.org/site/index.php?section=1 for the homepage. Of course we’re on the “/site/”-no need to stretch out that URL, especially for those trying to remember the address or who want to forward it in an email without the address starting to wrap. The URL can be rewritten on the server side, it looks like they’re running Apache, without impacting the underlying structure. StJeromeOnline.org/bulletin/, for example, is shorter and easier to remember–and more obvious to a search engine than www.stjeromeonline.org/site/index.php?section=5. And if you want to show someone the actual bulletin link, the URL really gets out of hand: http://www.stjeromeonline.org/site/index.php?action=view&id=184
  &module=resourcesmodule&src=%40random43931f1adef98. Yikes.
• Add unique title tags for each page. Right now each page reads St. Jerome Catholic Church Largo Florida. This is probably related to the structure used in the previous point. St. Jerome’s is potentially confusing anyone who bookmarks a page. Moreover, the site is missing the opportunity to give search engines some more information about each page and shortchanging potential visitors who are looking for more details in search engine results.
• The footer helpfully includes links to “contact” and “webmaster,” but both of these are actually mailto: links to the same address. Perhaps these were two different people in the past, but don’t include two links to the same place right next to each other. Also, it’s better to make it clear that the link isn’t to a web page, but will launch the user’s email client.
• Don’t include an active link to the home page on the home page itself (it’s in the header and footer).
• The bulletin page includes a list of links by date, which you would think would launch that week’s bulletin, right? But the link takes you to another page with the same link, and from there you can launch the PDF of the bulletin. (An HTML version would be better for users–no need to launch a separate application–and for search engine optimization because of the keyword-rich text and opportunity to cross link internally).

With the start of 2007, the introductory text about the jubilee on the home page should be changed to past tense; still noteworthy, but refer to 2006 as last year. Anyway, let’s all offer the St. Jerome community congratulations on 50 years and share a lesson you learned from their site.

Technorati tags: site review and stjeromeonline.org

• People pictures, not empty building pictures - The Church is the people, right? Then how come so many sites limit their photos to building exteriors or empty interiors? Sts. J-A gets it right by showing the choir and other volunteers in action on the homepage. You’ll also find shots of the property, too, so that newcomers can find it in person.
• Clearly set the tone of the parish on the home page - A prominent outreach link and an Iraq War Body Count banner let you know what this parish is about up front. Newcomers or church shoppers don’t have to guess what’s important to this parish.
• Timely homepage - Current readings and an acknowledgement of the Site of the Month designation reassure visitors that this is an active and worthwhile site. Including some key parish events here would further reinforce this impression.

This is a site that’s doing a lot of the right things. In a few areas, though, the content looks like it’s not quire ready to go “live”. The calendar points to an unbranded, separate .mac account that lists but one event for November and none for December. Better to stick with the established announcements page or use a regular page on the site. The placeholder “cemetery (coming soon)” navigation link would be frustrating to someone who just experienced a loved one’s death. Just link to contact information or leave out the link until the content is ready. And once you get beyond the homepage, the title tags no longer reference the church’s name, such as “Liturgical Ministries” or “Join Our Parish,” which begs the question which parish? if you’re relying on that snippet in your bookmarks or search engine results. I’d also love to see a couple of staples from other church sites: a site-specific search engine and weekly Sunday bulletins, but the site has so much else going for it.

So what lessons did you learn from the terrific St. John’s and St. Ann’s site?