I have finally got the Church sermons up on the blog and changed the blog look to the simpler ones after seeing the man of steel do it for his church.
Each on also has the screen art we use in the service
Check out that blog soon for all of the newspaper ads we are running and have won an award for
The screen art is a nice touch!
Adding a one-paragraph summary, or perhaps a simple outline, along side each sermon would help get your keywords/topics noticed by the search engines–and therefore prospective new members.
Keep up the good work!
Yeah thanks…as far as the outlines…will that still work as well considering I am not doing the blog as posts but only pages? because if it does ill add more text. I wasnted it to look as similar to a website as possible to eliminate confusion for different age groups going on to listen to the sermons…posts get lost pages dont…
thanks for checking it out
I agree that having the sermons on a fixed page like you do now makes it easier to navigate than expecting users to track down individual posts. Adding a one-sentence summary would still help with Google because that snippet could show up as the description in the search engine results.
How long do you plan on making the sermons available online? If all of them will be available indefinitely then you’ll need to think about handling archiving. Otherwise, eventually the sermon page is going to grow really loooong. You might check your stats to see if, say, it’s the latest 3 weeks that are the most popular. After that point the sermons could move to a separate archive page whose main purpose is for the search engines; perhaps at that point the summaries are added.
If you’re only showing the most recent X sermons then it’s not an issue.
ok I think i will try to add a summary line or two next week. thanks for the tip..
I havent decided how I want to handle the archiving. I guess I could do an archive sermon page on the blog. sadly there is no way of checking the stats because wordpress only gives you stats on posts not pages.
thanks again for the advice…trust me I am running everything you give me and i read on your blog through my head to try to make things better
If the standalone pages don’t show up in the stats then that’s a tough problem to work around. Here are a couple of imperfect options.
Run a one-question poll on the page just to get a sense if anyone is visiting. You could ask “Should we keep making sermons available here?”, “How often do you visit?” or another query with multiple choice responses. Only a minority of visitors will reply, but at least you’d have partial traffic data. Plus, you could see if the numbers go up over time. PollDaddy.com offers free polls for blogs.
Another option — list a table of contents on the sermons page, but link each entry to a blog post that holds the audio file and fuller description. That would let you have statistics while keeping an easy to find main sermons page, but the price is losing both the elegance of the current page and some traffic from those who don’t want to deal with extra clicks.
nice tips thanks…Ive been trying to see how I could do it where im getting stats and traffic, and those ideas may just work..
I added a synopsis this week…I like it and will keep that up.
Thank you for the opportunity you have given me to feel a connection with St. Michael’s Church. I live in Lowell, MA and am a member of Eliot Presbyterian Church.
Lori and Rich Reynolds are my family, and when I visited with them, I have visited St. Michaels. I feel very beautifully connected, and I thank you for the opportunity to read all about the goings on and what’s happening.
I wish you all the greatest success and happiness with this church.
See…I now have 2 churches !!!!!
Ruth…I am so glad you are listening to the sermons and are apart of the stuff. Lori and Rich are fantastic. I hear 2 is better than one. ha ha ha…God bless
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