When it comes to the weekly bulletin or posting some news on the church’s website, the content is the most important thing. But we must also think and consider the layout of the prose and type so that the message is communicated in as effective way as possible.
Taking time to improve the typographical elements such as apostrophes, dashes and quotation marks is important as it shows a level of detail and effort has been put in. It demonstrates that the church is interested in the small details as well as the ‘big picture’. And it just looks better, even if the reader cannot identify why.
There are many resources on typography, but a key reference for the web is the alistapart.com typographical design archives. For a recent summary see the ‘Web Typography Sucks’ lecture notes from the recent South by South West conference.
Previously:
Typography tips for church bulletins and circulars
Church typography
7 comments
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23 March 2007 at 5:16 am
faithfulweb
Good points. I’d add if you’re going to include your bulletin on your website, which you should, then convert it to HTML and a Web-friendly font. Don’t make your congregation suffer through reading a print-based PDF on a computer screen.
23 March 2007 at 7:21 am
David
Thanks for your comment. How would you suggest keeping multiple versions of the bulletin on your site. Or just put the content in a post?
24 March 2007 at 4:02 am
faithfulweb
For my church, I use a 301 redirect so that anyone selecting the bulletin link is automatically sent to the latest version of the bulletin. We use the naming convention is yyyymmdd.php so each file is in fact a perma link. Each bulletin also contains an include-file that pulls in navigation to all available bulletins. You can see this in action at:
http://www.stcharleschurch.org/bulletin/
I don’t have to touch any of the older bulletins to give them updated navigation due to the include-file. With this approach, users always see the most recent version of the bulletin, but can still navigate to older issues. At the same time, someone arriving at an older bulletin through a search engine can navigate to more recent versions.
I’ve conducted usability tests of newsletter sites that showed some users will abandon a page when clicking “newsletter” pulls up a list of available issues rather than the latest issue. In response, I make sure my visitors immediately pull up a bulletin while still offering side navigation if they want a different week.
Lastly, by using HTML rather than PDFs, I can easily cross link to other sections of the site and I provide search engines with plenty of keyword-rich content. The archives also provide a convenient historical record.
27 March 2007 at 6:42 am
David
Thanks for your comments. I think you have given me the motivation to make a HTML version of our church’s bulletin available.
But we still want a PDF version that people can print before they arrive at church, so are there problems with google and duplicate content?
30 March 2007 at 5:39 am
faithfulweb
That’s a good point. I’d say it’s a risk.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html
You can mitigate it using nofollow tags on the pdf links, or on the robots.txt level if the pdfs are in a separate location.
Even without a penalty, which would you rather have show up in the search engine results? Sure, Google can show a PDF along with their attempt at an HTML version of the PDF, but having your properly formatted page would be better.
You may also want to check with your members. If the vast majority are exclusively using the PDFs to print and aren’t reading them on screen (and you don’t need the HTML SEO benefits) then I can see a case for PDFs. That’s not going to be the case for most churches, but it could apply to yours based on what you described.
3 April 2007 at 1:52 pm
David
Check with my members? I’d be glad if they just visited the website.
What proportion of your membership use the online bulletins?
29 May 2007 at 3:26 pm
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