Design Critique #1

Olivia Graziano

Design Critique #1

Website Design 1

Mr. Mielke

9/25/2025

Church Websites

1. Poor Design (300 words)

Home

• Overall design
  Rating: 5/10
  The website is very plain, and there’s little content having to do with the church itself. There are no photos of the church, church family, staff, or even of any of the pastor preaching. The website could use a lot more to fill it. There is a lack of color variety, which makes the site feel very forgettable and dull. Instead of multiple soft, dated colors on the site, it should instead have a contrasting color scheme so that it stands out more.
• Navigation
  Rating: 7.5/10
  Navigation is easy to follow, and the text is legible enough, so I know where to go. It is well organized and the buttons have an underline animation that pops up when you hover over it, so it makes it clear what you are pressing. Overall, it’s hard to get confused when navigating the site.
• Functionality
  Rating: 6/10
  The website functions well. There are no major bugs, and in one section where it gives a brief overview of the sermon messages, it includes verses references that, when hovered over, are hyperlinks leading you to Blue Letter Bible and Bible Gateway. It’s a really interesting feature that allows you to just hover over the verse reference and read the entire verse powered by another site. The only issue with this is I don’t want to be led to another site but would instead like the whole verse to just be written out. The whole point is to promote your own church, so it’s distracting if I press a hyperlink onto another site and start scrolling through that one.
• Content quality
  Rating: 5/10
  The quality of the content itself is sparse, and it’s overall just lacking in information. There’s little explanation about the church or the history of it, and there’s plenty of negative space to fill in. The quality of the content is vague and could use more context. This would be helpful for people trying to find a new church who have no idea what Grace Bible Church is about. However, the writing of it is professional enough.
• Site effectiveness
  Rating: 3/10
  Is it effective in gaining traction or attention? No. Though not visually very appealing or eye-catching in any way, the content is still fairly straight-forward and gives you the basic information you need about the church. Right on the homepage it shows the mission and location using a mini-map.

1. Good Design (300 words)

https://www.bmm.org

• Overall design
  Rating: 9/10
  The design is very clean, professional and easy to navigate. The colors are simple but eye catching, and easy to recognize if I were to go on their website again. The image choices are very smart, since they involve communities and lots of faces, which people generally like to see when gaining an interest in an organization. The flow is a little off, where I feel like the content is smushed onto the homepage and isn’t spread out enough, since all the information being loaded onto the home screen gives my eyes a lot to look at, and I have to slow down to process what I’m reading.