Stuff Kent Thinks
- Check out this jazz - especially "Eye Heart World" (which is a Squarespace site...)
- You're smart to keep things very basic, especially at the beginning. As the DNA of Living Savior develops, you'll want to reflect the priorities and uniqueness of your church on your site. Illumine's site tries to stress the big three: Worship, Education, & Community Service all the time. Whatever your hallmarks are, you'll find ways to integrate them into the site.
- Link more. Whenever you mention another page, be it on your website or somewhere else in the internet, link it. That's helpful to people and to your place in search engines.
- You can link to pages within your site by highlighting the text you want to link, clicking the link button, and choosing the "content" tab. This will give you a list of your pages.
- I added an actual "Contact Us" page and inserted a form. Forms are really useful on Squarespace, because you can customize the destination of the information people give you. You can have it get emailed to your livingsaviorpastor@gmail.com account, you can have it auto-entered into a Google spreadsheet, or you can have email/contact info go straight into Mailchimp. A-flipping-mazing.
- I added an announcement bar, which you can enable or disable under the DESIGN section of Squarespace. It's useful for announcements.
- Oh man, just discovered these "Banner Images" that this template allows. These are your bread and butter, the wind beneath your wings. They will carry you above the din and rabble of average Blair church websites into the celestial glory of Nebraska search engine domination.
- Honestly, though, the quality, consistency, and interesting interplay of these Banner Images is the thing that will hook people on your site (at least as far as design is concerned.)
- You need to learn to find high-quality stock images as soon as you can, starting with Flickr's Creative Commons.
- On the home page...
- Right now when I go to the home page, I don't know what to do next, so I'm might just decide to leave. Give people a couple clear next steps. You can be as bold as saying "Click here for..." <-- and that is what we call an Easter egg. Very valuable for websites.
- Link to at least a Google map of where the hospital is.
- Are you creating handouts for this class? Can we archive them on the site so someone who comes to the home page can click through to see them?
- I also made and enabled a custom 404 page for you. Because I love you. Now I'm done for the day.