Shortcuts to Success

While I wait for church to start on Sunday morning, I have begun playing a little game. Since our church is an iMinistries customer, I read through the bulletin and look for references to the church website. I've had weeks where the website gets 20+ references. What I am especially happy about are shortcut references.

Throughout your site you are able to add shortcuts to practically any page. A shortcut allows you to give your visitors a direct, easy-to-remember reference to a page. For instance, if you create a shortcut to a photo gallery which is "potluckpictures," your visitors can access that gallery by simply typing "http://yoursite.org/potluckpictures."

For our church, this has led to a dramatic change in the bulletin. The ministry team has been relieved of providing every bit of detail for each item and can now offer a small introduction while directing the curious straight to more information on the website. Our research shows that people use these shortcuts a lot.

Here are a few tips to using shortcuts:

Keep them short but descriptive
People can only remember so much. A shortcut like "mensretreatandworkweekendphotogallery" sort of defeats the purpose--"mensweekendpics" is probably better.

Avoid acronyms unless they are very well known
"VBS" is good, since I'm more likely to identify the "church's summer program" as "VBS" than "Vacation Bible School" anymore. But if your church offers a class called "Introduction to Christian Faith," chances are that "ICF" isn't entirely memorable while "introtofaith" might be.

Shortcuts can only be used once
One customer has already run into "overlap" with their shortcuts. Last year's New Year's Eve event had the shortcut "newyears" and had to be removed before that shortcut could be used on this year's event. We'd suggest "newyears2008" as a better practice for something you do regularly.

Feel free to drop the WWW
Your site is most certainly reachable at both "www.mysite.org" and "mysite.org." When you write your shortcuts, save space and leave off the "www." The URL "mysite.org/shortcut1" is simple to type and takes up little of your valuable bulletin space.

Don't miss out on using this feature.