Faith and Web

At times I hear people say that having the congregation’s mission statement on the home page is a waste of space. My inclination is to agree. Mission statements appeal to me about as much stale toast. But this Monday I had one of those ah-ha moments.

Our church is redoing its mission and vision statements, and I went to one of the sessions on Sunday. To my amazement, it turned out to be pivotal, and 24 hours later its relevance to the website hit me. The smart people in charge of this process elicited what we valued most, and then distilled those values into one or two feeling words, such as….

• Acceptance
• Sanctuary
• Gratitude

Powerful stuff. A day later, I realized how visual these words could be – how they could translate into photos and images on our home page.

From a more pragmatic standpoint, mission statements and the like can help in search engine rankings. They’re typically full of keywords – hopefully the kind of keywords people are searching for. The thing to do is put such text high in the code where search engines will give it more weight, and then use CSS so on a monitor the same text falls in a less important place — either “below the fold” or outside the “hot zones” of eye-tracking studies.

Four days later I’m itching to do a redesign. But I must be patient, and wait for our mission statement to be finalized.

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There are few things about website creation more important and more intimidating than Search Engine Optimization - or “SEO” as it’s called in the business. If you want to make marketing hotshots cower, start talking SEO at them. Most will pale and try to change the subject. This is not without cause. Search engines are complex and their algorithms change with some regularity.

Take heart, though. There are about 20 core practices that haven’t changed significantly in a number of years. Moreover, chances are you’ve already done several of them. Of the remaining ones, there are a number of straightforward things you can do. It’s not a black art.

I have broken the core SEO practices out in a checklist. I don’t typically elaborate since that’s not really the nature of a checklist. Of course understanding more is going to enhance your skills, so if you are interested I’d encourage you to dig into the resources at the end of the checklist.

• Checklist for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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