Faith and Web

It’s one of the easiest of web practices and yet I see it violated every day. I’m talking about the W3C’s guideline to make link text meaningful vs. links that say “Click here.”

If you send me text to post on the web including a “Click here” link, I can guarantee you two things. First, I will gnash my teeth and maybe even wail. Second, I will exercise my web diva prerogative and edit your copy. I will do what it takes to turn it into a meaningful link. Fortunately it’s not hard.

But first you might ask, why isn’t “click here” meaningful? The answer is the context. In a particular rendition, yes, “click here” makes sense. If you are looking at it in Internet Explorer on a monitor, chances are it will make perfect sense.

But what if you’re a search engine? What are you supposed to be indexing? Search engines these days are smart, but they aren’t that smart.

Or what if your vision is impaired and your screen reader only renders links for the site? That’s the way many vision-impaired people go through sites, because it makes navigating the web much more efficient. The result is your reader says, “Click here.” That’s it. Click to where? And why? There’s no way to know short of reconfiguring your reader and going into a laborious process of wading through whatever else is on the page. What are the chances you’ll do that? And what will you think of the site in general?

So how do you, the web editor, make the link meaningful? Almost invariably the text that really should be the link is in a phrase right before or after the offending “click here.” Thus, “Click here to find out more about my church” becomes simply “Find out more about my church.” Better yet, summarize what this “more information” is. “More information” is often equally meaningless. How about “Information for church visitors” or “Church FAQ”?

What’s the end result of this simple change? All of your very different audiences will be happy. A search engine will have something to index, the screen reader will report accurately what the link is, and the person on Internet Explorer 6 will not only understand it, but will understand it more quickly. You will have condensed and clarified where the link goes. You’ll have made the link meaningful. It’s a beautiful thing.

4 Comments »

“404 Page Not Found” errors are one of those curses of the web. Left to its own devices, your web server software will spit back a stark message that’s bound to at least annoy, if not downright discourage, your users. Some say it even affects your search engine rankings, though that doesn’t make much sense to me.

Certainly 404s can undermine users’ trust in your site. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for, they won’t link to it, and that could in a roundabout way affect your rankings. In the end, though, setting up a user-friendly 404 page is simply the right thing to do.

How to Set Up a Custom 404 Page

How you trigger your own customized 404 depends on your web host or server. For most of us this means checking the host’s documentation. In my experience, they all have it spelled out somewhere. Just search “404″ in their help section. What exactly you have to do will vary quite a bit. Some are as simple as entering a page to point to from the host’s control panel. Others will have you do a few kart-wheels such as setting up an “.htaccess” file. If you can’t find precisely what’s needed, contact your host.

What a Custom 404 Page Must Have

Once you know how to set up your 404 page, the next question is what do you include on it? Opinions vary. Mine is that there are three absolute requirements:

• A simple apology. It’s important to be polite. We represent congregations, and should act accordingly.
• Links back to the most helpful pages, such as the home page and the site map.
• A way to contact you or someone else who can help.

If your site is over a certain size, include a search box. For many church sites, this will be overkill. If your site is only ten pages, don’t have a search box; just list your ten pages. If your site is 500+ pages, then a search box is a must.

One tip: if you add the following meta tag in the <head> section, search engines won’t end up accidentally indexing your 404 page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

Also, in case an example might help, here’s my church’s 404.

Further Information

For more in depth 404 information, inspiration and even amusement, there’s no better place than the 404 Research Lab. Even if you don’t need 404 help, the lab is worth a quick visit for any serious web geek or diva.

3 Comments »

Speaking as Middle Old person (ugh, what a nasty label), I must say more websites than not are ill-suited to seniors. What might be cool to a younger audience is frequently bewildering to the point-of-no-return to an older audience.

However, if you want to attract seniors (and I would think most churches would), it’s really not hard. With real estate, they say, it’s location, location, location. With sites for seniors, it’s fonts, fonts, fonts. In particular:

1. Make the fonts larger. Personally, I end up squinting at a great many sites. Then I will ratchet up the font size. That’s no problem on a Mac (Command-plus is a myopic dream-come-true), but not so with Internet Explorer on a PC. If I increase the text size through the menu bar, it works for some sites, but not others. When it doesn’t work, it’s because the fonts are sized absolutely – a big no-no in web design, but all too common.
2. San serif fonts, in particular Verdana, are easier for older eyes to read on screen.
3. For navigation, make the fonts even larger and in a bold context. Subtlety and artistry are not the order of the day here.
4. Increase the line spacing. I typically use a CSS line-height of 1.6 (which means 1.6em or 160%).
5. Keep Flash and other animation to a minimum.
6. Make it easy to donate money. Don’t discreetly bury donation and pledge forms.
7. Have content that’s of interest to older people. Our seniors particularly like the sermons we keep on our site. And when we have a senior’s brunch, it’s easy to take photos and make a web album. The more ambitious could do things such as video interviews of the oldest members and stream them, which would also have great historical potential. Or just ask seniors what they would like on the web and then do it. Really, it’s that simple.

For more information and references (though ironically, I find it a bit hard to read), see the March, 2007, UI Design Newsletter.

No Comments »

Jacob Nielsen writes one of my favorite email newsletters: Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability. It’s not pretty, but it packs a ton of useful information into almost every issue. The March 12 issue on 10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities was no exception. What’s more, much of it is relevant to religious organizations.

Relevant to Churches

While several of his points are strictly for businesses, most apply to religious organizations too, including:

1. Email Newsletters
2. Simplified Text. A great religious professional is great with words. The thing is, how do we simple techies tap into these verbal powerhouses? According to Nielsen, better writing is the key to improving a site. My church’s professionals don’t have time for the web, so our solution is to have a volunteer editor who can politely nag those in the know. We know she’s a treasure and reward her the best way we know how — lots of praise and chocolate.
3. Catering to Seniors. I hope to talk more about this soon. Suffice it to say, I agree with Nielsen that this is a critically important and often overlooked audience.
4. Gift-Giving Support. For us, this would be building easy online donation forms.
5. My personal favorite — User Testing. Read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think to quickly and enjoyably learn why and how to do user testing.

Nielsen concludes that “Interface design is about making money for the company.” I conclude that interface design is about promoting ministry.

No Comments »