Church Marketing Sucks

Recently we looked at the Top 10 Web Design Mistakes from Jakob Nielsen, and now he presents the Top 10 Blog Design Mistakes. You can certainly take what Nielsen says with a grain of salt (not everybody likes him), but he usually has some good basic points.

When it comes to blogs the top 10 mistakes are:

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

Here at Church Marketing Sucks I think we’re only guilty of the second one. Some of the others may be open for debate, but I think we usually do fairly well.

For churches or pastors who are blogging, a few of these are especially important. An author bio and photo give credibility and personality. Your church members may know who you are, but visitors don’t. Publishing frequently is also important in order to build an audience. If you post infrequently visitors will think you’re just out of date and members will never bother to visit your blog.

Some of the navigational suggestions are good. I’ve always thought blogs have poor menu designs and the old calendar has to be coolest looking useless navigation system ever. I’ve deleted those from all my blogs. Here at CMS we try to include more helpful navigation links, offering some “classic hits” in the sidebar and more options at the bottom of the homepage so you don’t have to scroll back to the top.

The problem is that it’s often hard to improve a blog’s navigation unless you know enough code to rework the templates. That’s probably not the case for most blogging pastors.

(link via eMinistryNotes)