I did this video review live on my LiveStream account a little while ago.  Kind of fun.  I’ll try to give a little more warning before I do a live one next time.  Anyhow, check it out below!

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Site Review: LaGrange Park Baptist Church – Fayetteville, NC

Check out the video review below.  As always, please share your thoughts in the comments or request your own review via our Twitter account.

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Site Review: Morrisontown UMC – Morristown, NJ

Another video review for you.  I kind of like doing these, so send us your requests via Twitter and we’ll try to showcase your church.

Leave your thoughts about this review in the comment section below.  Thanks!

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Site Review: Crossroads Christian Church – New Smyrna Beach, FL

I’ve decided to take a different approach with this review and do it via video.  Let me know what you think of the technique (do you prefer video or text), as well as the content.

Two quick links for things mentioned in the video: How to fix canonicalization issues and what proper title tags should look like.

If you’d like your site reviewed (free of charge, of course), just send us a message on Twitter (@ChurchWebsite) and we’ll get one posted.

Enjoy!

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Site Review: New Hope Christian Fellowship Oahu

In fact, I’ve been trying to get more proactive on Twitter to assist churches there.  If you have any questions, thoughts or ideas, send us a message there.

@churchwebsite

Thanks!

Mickey

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Ask us on Twitter

• Showcase our staff Twitter accounts
• Post a page with a summary of current staff tweets
• Show live chat from events
• Find out who else from your church is on Twitter
• Tweet live from retreats and/or mission trips
• Post weather-related updates
• Post blog entries
• A few other tidbits

Hopefully you find the article useful.  Check it out at TwiTip, or you can see the re-post of it on Anthony Coppedge’s blog here.

What other ways does your church use Twitter?

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Twitter Tips for Churches

The e-book is excellent.  It’s only $5 and is well worth it.  I have no financial interest in you getting the book — I simply think it’s something that every church needs to look at and consider.

Does your church already Twitter?  If so, what kind of cool stuff have you been doing with it?

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Does your church Twitter yet?

It’s somewhat similar to the other guitar tab sites out there, but with a few key differences:

• Less “stuff”, just music.  No CD reviews, no online store, no concert listings, etc.
• A vastly streamlined database structure.  So many artists cover the same song that the current structure of tab sites simply doesn’t make sense.  For example, we already show six different artists for “Here I Am To Worship“, and I’m sure there are more out there.  On most sites, you’d have to look under each artist’s section to see what tabs they have for each one, then decide on the best.  With TFW, they all point to the same page, giving you quick access to every version of the song that has been submitted to the site.  More about our database layout can be found here.
• No separation of “praise” music from the main database.  On most other sites, there is a “guitar/Christian” section, and then a “praise/worship” section.  Why?  We have it all in one database, with the artists, songs and albums extensively cross-linked so you can browse quickly.
• A clean, fast mobile site.  This won’t be of great value on a regular basis, but could be essential in a crunch.  Maybe you can’t remember the bridge to a certain song — just pull up the mobile site, find the song you want, view the tabs, and get on with it.
• No registration required, and certainly no payment required.  Many (but not all) sites require you to log-in before you can view the songs, and some even require payment.  Not us.  We want to help you find your information as quickly as possible, and registration is simply a barrier to that.  Of course, if you’d like to stick around we certainly encourage you to register and join our forums, but that’s definately not required.

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New source for guitar tabs

The solution is very simple.  Edit the code to include the “nofollow” attribute.  This will leave the link there for people to see and click, but Google will stop following it and it’ll help you focus your link juice on your other pages.  For example, the link probably looks something like this:

<a href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

Simply add rel=nofollow in there, like this:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.xxxxxdesign.com/”>Designed by xxxxx</a>

That’s it!

Frankly, I get more upset about this the more I think about it.  Most design/development/hosting companies promise to give you great Search Engine Optimization and help you rank better, then steal a good chunk of your link juice for their own gain.  It’s awful!  I have never done that to a client and I never will.

If you’re a company that does this kind of work for churches and you already nofollow your links on their sites, please let me know in the comments below and I’ll give you some praise.

What if you want to take it further and sculpt your PageRank a bit more?  First, we need to explain what sculpting is — it’s simply the act of nofollowing certain links on your site to help focus the link juice on pages that are more important.  For example, the “privacy statement” on this blog is nofollowed.  I don’t care if it ranks well, and I’d rather get more link juice flowing to the posts on the blog.

On the right is a picture of our church website with the images turned off and the “NoDoFollow” FireFox plug-in turned on (click to view it full-size), to better visualize the link structure of the site.  The blue links are normal (”followed”) links, and the red links are nofollowed.  I’ll explain my reasoning for some of the nofollows:

• “Event Registration” on the right — This points to our third-party Event Registration service.  I want the individual events to rank well, but not the generic registration area.
• “Prayer Requests” on the left — This is just a form for people to fill out.  Why would I want it to rank well?
• The recent blog entries in the middle — We already link to the main blog twice on the home page, so we didn’t want to dilute the PageRank that much more.
• In the center column, you’ll see text duplicated side-by-side (”Preschool Fall Festival”, etc).  These are upcoming events.  The text the on the left is actually an image (view our normal site to see them).  No sense linking each event twice, so we’ll link the text-based version to pass better anchor text to the event page.

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Don’t let your web design firm trash your Google rankings

I’ve spent the last few days searching, and I’ve found 42 groups so far!  It’s crazy.  About half of them (22) are by/for students, a few Sunday School classes have their own, our music ministry has 7 groups, our Academy has 3, and then there are a few others.  Even our MOPS ladies made their own group!

Now granted, a lot of them are tiny and/or dead (”Girls Retreat 07″), but many are quite vibrant.   So how does this affect you?

First, find your church groups that are out there already.  It’s taken me a while to track all of these down, and I’m sure there’s a few more out there.  Run some group searches with variations of your church name (”mount bethel”, “mt bethel”, “mt. bethel”, “mtb”, etc).  Once you’ve exhausted that, find church members on Facebook and see what groups they are already in.

Second, think about what other kinds of groups you can offer.  A church member built a group for Live it Live (children’s worship program at our church), and our media folks have started posting weekly videos to the group.  We also just added a group for our Encounter (contemporary) service, where they’ll be posting photos, videos, sermon notes, etc.  Both of those could be of great value to our members, and great outreach to potential visitors.

Once you’ve done that, you can cross-promote between Facebook and your site.  Link to Facebook groups from your site (”for more about our upcoming trip to Kenya, join our Facebook group“).  Link back to your site (when appropriate) from your Facebook group.

As church webmasters, we need to start letting go of a little control.  You used to want everyone to come to your site, and that’s still an admirable goal.  However, job #1 is getting information to those that need it, which often doesn’t involve your site.  Our blog posts go out to RSS subscribers, e-mail subscribers, Twitter users, FriendFeed users, etc.  Many people get our bulletin via e-mail, which has lots of great info on it.  We have a lot of members that subscribe to our Podcasts.  Others obviously use Facebook.  None of those people may visit our site, but that’s ok.  As long as they get the information, they’ll still hopefully visit the church and connect with people there, which is the main goal of church-related digital communications.

How else can you use Facebook to facilitate activites at your church?

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How much does your church use Facebook? The answer might surprise you.