All the sites in my survey are church sites that use XOOPS or ImpressCMS as their platform. The questions in the survey required no knowledge of the ministry, the platform, or the processes behind maintaining the site.

Technical Dimensions

• Favorite Icon (favicon.ico)
• Meta Keywords
• Meta Description

Those 3 things are low-hanging fruit - easily changed and definitely demonstrates you have gone about building this website in a deliberate fashion. Now, each content management system (CMS) provides defaults for each of these, just to provide an example. But, that's a problem, especially if you don't change them! Chances are, if you don't know what they are, you didn't change them and your site is being branded more for the CMS you use than for the ministry you support.

Favicon

The favorite icon is an image, usually a smaller version of a logo, that displays in the address bar of the web browsers. If you don't have a favicon for your site (and 57% of the sites I analyzed were still using the default icon provided by their cms), it is very easy to create one. Just do a search for 'favicon generator' and you will find you can do it online, just by uploading an image or photo Just remember, the icon will only be 16 pixels high when it is finished, so simple images work best. Try a few images and see what works out best. Once you have one you like, upload it to the main folder for your site - you'll already see one there, just replace it. Just remember to save a copy of your new icon, just in case you overwrite it when you update your cms.

Meta Keywords and Description

These 2 aren't visible when viewing your site, but they are visible to search engines and just over 20% of the sites had the default values for one or the other, sometimes both! Key thing here - if you don't know what to put in either of them, remove the defaults and leave them blank. These global settings should apply to every page on your site, so if what you use for keywords don't appear on every page, don't leave them as keywords. And been reasonable about the number of keywords - 3 to 5, at the maximum. Some modules also add module and page specific keywords, which is good, so you aren't stuck with the defaults. Take a look at the default keywords sometime - do you even know what half of them are, let alone what they might have in common with your church?

For more information about the meta tags, you can get the basics (and a little more) from this artice on XOOPS and ImpressCMS meta tags.

Even the simplest of websites can get these right, so be sure you get them right for your church web site.