A Board member of Immanuel United Methodist Church in Camillus, NY (known as Church of the Bells) recommended me to take over their website management. The volunteer who had created the site and was maintaining it could no longer continue.
This was my first experience with Weebly, a DIY website platform recently taken over by Square. As with other DIY platforms, this one has limitations, but not enough to incur the expense of moving. (Can you believe that it doesn't provide for a nice logo at the top??? I tricked it to get a reasonable branded image, but really???)
The volunteer had a technology background and did a nice job with the site. As I got into it, it was apparent that he didn't (understandably) know about some web standards. One of the most significant adjustments has been moving some "looong" pages of updated content into a "blogpost" style. News & Events, Resources and the pastor's weekly message have been changed to blogs. Besides eliminating the "too long" pages, it provides a way to search for the content, ability to link to posts in emails and from other articles on the site, and maintain a "recent posts" section on the home page for easy access to new content. This also provides better SEO by having one topic per page, and the likelihood of visitors looking through more pages.
The donation software used was pretty "clunky" and not really user-friendly. We discovered the vendor offered a much nicer and more modern option, which was implemented.
We provided an improved email template that was branded for the church. We've also have coached the administrator on how to add links and buttons to content in the emails to make it easier for recipients to access the content.
The administrator and members are very conscious of updating the website content -- nice to see.
Services we provide:
- Routine content updates to the website
- Recommendations for the website and coaching for other digital tools
- Consultation on technical issues.
Visit Church of the Bells Website