Nonprofit Expressions

About Website Report Cards: Our report cards are for website owners who want to improve their sites. We look at websites and formulate our report cards by evaluating four main criteria: first impressions, usability, search engine optimization and technical standards.

Learn about how we decided on our criteria, and get a more complete definition the 4 categories.

Website: http://www.NewChurches.com

1. First Impressions

The look & feel of this website doesn’t need a lot of work. In fact, I don’t think it needs any at all. Upon first glance I am stunned by its beauty! The natural colors, web 2.0 feel and images draw me in to want more.

Upon a closer look, I find an equally attractive interior. It consistently brands the “for new churches” logo, uses repetition in colors and layout, as well as menu bar.

Pleasing to the eye: A +
Proximity: A
Alignment: A +
Repetition: A +
Contrast: A -
Reflection of branding and purpose: A +

GRADE: A
—————————————————————————-

2. Usability

The usability is fairly simple. The main menu stays consistent and is conventional with modern website formats. The home page includes a second menu on the top left that gives users another opportunity to engage themselves in the content of the site.

The purpose of the site is obvious by its name (”for new churches”), however, when looking for an “About Us” page I noted that this page either does not exist, or is too difficult to find. The closest thing I found was the “Getting Started” page which includes a video from one of its founders that gives you a quick overview of the purpose and navigation of the tools on the site. This is helpful, but not all users are going to have the capability or desire to watch this video.

The site is chock full of free resources, downloads, blogs and directories that are all very helpful. When I searched for some sort of newsletter subscription or contact us form, I found neither. I had to do some digging to find a place to subscribe to “Ed’s picks.”

User’s ability to understand, comprehend and interact with the website: A
User’s frustration or anxiety associated with the website: B
User’s ability to find the site’s main purpose upon first glance: A -
Consistent Navigation: A +
Easy Navigation: A +
Navigation visibility: A +
Website accomplishes functional goals: A -
Use of applications: A
Newsletter Signup: C

GRADE: B
—————————————————————————-

3. Search Engine Optimization

Although initially the layout of this site appears to be non-search engine friendly, with its lack of text, the first thing we noticed was its 4/10 page rank. This is excellent considering most websites only rank 2/10 - are rarely get over a 6! Then when we popped the hood and looked at the code we mostly liked what we saw. The menu’s are unordered lists with heavy styling (a great way to go for SEO). The only initial problem we saw was the lack of h1 tags near the top of the pages. The title tags have many keywords to be desired, but are not set to default.

The Meta tags are outright missing. This is kind of a sad mistake because they are so easy to include, and they do help when the search engines want a description of the page. The clean URL strings are beautiful though. Its quite impressive to see no file names at the end of the URL strings. This tells us they are probably using Ruby on Rails for the site development. (I love it!)

Title tags: C
Meta tags: F
Clean URLs: A +
Semantic information design: A
Descriptive anchor tags: A
Google’s Page Rank: B

GRADE: C +
—————————————————————————-

4. Technical Standards

The first thing to notice about the code under the hood is the Doctype. XHTML 1.0 Strict. This alone points toward good coding practices. Once we ran it through the valiator at: http://validator.w3.org/check?verbose=1&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newchurches.com%2F we find there are 14 errors. This is alarming at first but almost every error relates to the use of an ‘&’ symbol. This is not perfect, but forgivable. We have to remember most sites do not live up to these standards.

When we ran an accessibility check we found no problems. My only complaint is that the code is very hard to read. It has comments, but it looks like it was generated by a program and placed together as opposed to hand written.

Doc type declaration: A +
HTML or XHTML standards compliant: B
CSS standards compliant: B
Accessibility standards compliant: A
Well formed code: B +

GRADE: B +
—————————————————————————-

FINAL GRADE: Passing (This site is definitely not stuck in the 90’s, and is living on the edge of cutting).
For a free report card on your website, please contact info@nonprofit-expressions.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 10:16 am and is filed under General, Improving your website, Website Design, Website Report Cards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.