Thanks Gavin for your last comment and you got me thinking. I went out and looked at all the conference sites within the Southeastern Jurisdiction. I may go outside my Jurisdiction soon, but for now I stayed at home. Here are the conference sites and a five star rating attached to them. * = poor, **= fair, ***= okay, ****= good, *****= great. It is amazing that in this technological age our main connectional body, the Conference, is so behind. (I'm not going to get started again). Here are the sites and my personal ratings for them.
Southeastern Jurisdiction ** (easy to get around but not even a list of the conferences within the Jurisdiction and links to their sites)
In alphabetic order:
Alabama-West Florida **** Missing some info here and there, but overall a good resource site.
Florida**** Good site, a little busy on the front page but has good information.
Holston***** GREAT site, eye catching, easy to use and very up-to-date. I cannot believe the conference actually has an IT and Data Center, DANG! I also love that the Bishop has a podcast, it seems this conference is up-to-date. GREAT JOB!!!
Kentucky** Looks good but took me four times of refreshing to get it to come up, plus there are pieces of info missing and I kept running into errors as I went to new pages, could be a temporary thing but no too impressive on my first visit there.
Memphis** This has everything on it, which is not a good thing. The long list of church websites is annoying and the camera sound drove me crazy until I saw there was a mute button. Never put automatic sounds on a website, it shows lack of professionalism!
Mississippi** Suffers from the same disease as Kentucky, errors galore, buttons not working, it looks okay but when a pages don't work it looks really bad.
North Alabama**** I think the connection aspect is big at this conference site and they provide some good information and is easy to get around and back again.
North Carolina*** Good info, easy to navigate but too many widgets.
North Georgia**** Good info, easy to use, lots of good information, but with patchy and needless clip-art here and there.
Red Bird Missionary*** A little tacky and in your face but better than some.
South Carolina** Too busy and old looking, needs lots of love.
South Georgia**** Good site although the pulldown windows over the tabs is a little annoying but overall great information with great ease in finding it.
Tennessee*** Too busy, like SCC. When going deeper buttons did not work in areas, too many widgets, and places where I thought hyperlinks were, they weren't. A little sloppy overall.
Virgina*** Clean look but that is because it lacks a lot too. Buttons go missing once you are about three pages deep.
Western North Carolina**** After looking at all the other conferences my home conference is not as bad as I thought. I like the real photos they always use and it is easy to find items but it is still missing that connectional option and they are constantly trying to update which makes some pages work and others not.
Overall I was extrememly impressed with the Holston Conference. That is amazing work there. Let me know what you think. I am right in my critiques or am I missing something on my first impressions for those who live on these sites?
2 comments:
you are way too kind. i would be much more critical.
I was speaking in very general terms and I know there are people out there who know a ton more than me about websites and technology. I just wanted to continue the conversation. So what one do you think is the worst and the best? What should every church/conference website have to make it practical, up-to-date and engaging?
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