Need Website Critque?

Question

I have just been appointed the webmaster for my church website, http://www.livingwatersbaptist.org/, and I am looking for some objective feedback. Please take a few moments of your time to visit the site and answer the following questions via reply post or send directly to [e-mail].

1.What about the current site do you find most effective and why?
2.What about the site do you find least effective and why?
3.If you could only change one thing about the site, what would you change and why?
4.Any other observations you find relevant to making the site more effective. The primary audience is those looking for a local church to visit. The secondary audience is the existing church membership.

Thanks for your time and advice.

Terrance

Answer 1

1. Simple layout with clear navigation
2. Speed, it seems to bog down on requests. Caching works fine, but new visitors will have a time..
3. Don't squash graphics like the pictures on your main page in the browser, re-size them appropriately, then post them.
4. Go for a catch-phrase of some kind. Something that will catch the eye visually and stick in their mind to associate with your church.

Answer 2

The site is very simple one I really appreciate that but i have the following suggestions:

1. Left menu hover color can be changed to a bit more bright color.

2. Register and Signin links hover color can be changed to a bit more bright color.

3. The site has used table extensively which will take time to load the page. It would be better if you replace the table based design into a table less design which is fully based on CSS and DIVs

4. You can replace big images used in the site (home page has one and a Map image) with a splited up small images which will load very fast. You need to consider people with slow internet connections also.

5. Check your Javascript code for any cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. Especially when you have a user registration process while the user may enter any javascript code in those form fields that might create some undesirable problems.

6. it would be better if you change the color used for the headers in the following page http://www.livingwatersbaptist.org/CC_Content_Page/0,,PTID299892|CHID545348|CIID,00.html

Answer 3

I like it. It's very straight forward. First thing most people look at is the top left corner and you have the name right there. Every page uses the same template and navigation, making it easy to figure out where you're at and where you want to go. The navigation is easy to read, easy to understand, and well organized. The only changes I would recommend (in my 3 minutes of looking at the site) would be to add the state to your address on the home page, as well as a phone number. Also, get rid of your "under construction" pages, if the page isn't ready, don't put a link there, just wait until the page is read and then add a link to it.

Oh, yeah, one more thing, it rendered quite well in Firefox. Too many small websites only work well in IE.