Faith United Church of Christ needed a website that reflected the congregation rather than one that simply listed service times. We rebuilt it from the ground up.
The challenge
Church websites carry more weight than most people assume. Someone new to the area is deciding whether to walk through the door on Sunday. A member is checking whether the youth group still meets on Wednesdays. A family is looking for a funeral service time.
Faith UCC’s site wasn’t organized for any of those. The information existed, but it was hard to find, the calendar had to be updated by hand in two places, and there was nowhere obvious for the livestream people had come to rely on.
What we did
Discovery and design first
We started by talking to the church’s stakeholder team about what the site actually needed to do, and for whom. Then we designed high-fidelity mockups and presented them before a line of the site was built.
That step matters more with a church than with most clients. A congregation has many voices with a legitimate stake in how their church presents itself, and a design review is far easier than rebuilding a finished site after the fact.
A sitemap that made room
We restructured the sitemap from scratch, organizing existing pages properly and adding room for what the church wanted to expand into. Ministries, events, worship, and the practical details visitors need now each have a clear home, rather than being nested three levels deep.
An events calendar that updates itself
The church already keeps its calendar in Google Calendar, so the site pulls from it automatically. Staff add an event once, in the tool they already use, and it appears on the website.
That’s the difference between a calendar that stays current and one that’s three months stale by spring. The best church website feature is the one that doesn’t need anybody to remember it.
Livestream built in
We integrated their YouTube livestream so services are watchable on the site itself. For anyone unwell, traveling, or not yet ready to attend in person, the service is right there rather than somewhere else on the internet.
Real photography
We brought a photographer on site to shoot new images of the church and the congregation. Stock photography is obvious, and on a church website it’s worse than obvious — it’s the opposite of what the page is trying to say. Visitors should see the actual sanctuary and the actual people.
Ongoing support
We still handle content updates for the church, along with technical support for their email systems, through our managed hosting and maintenance plan. Staff email a change; we make it.
The results
Faith UCC has a site that reflects the church as it is, a calendar that stays current on its own, and livestreams where people expect to find them. Staff can run it without technical skills, because the parts that need updating either update themselves or come to us.
You can see it at faithchurchucc.org.
If your church website needs rebuilding
Most church websites are maintained by whoever volunteered, and they go stale in predictable ways: an old calendar, a phone number for someone who’s moved on, photography from a decade ago.
The fix isn’t asking that volunteer to work harder. It’s building a site where the calendar syncs, the livestream is embedded, and the things that change often are easy to change — or handled for you.
If that sounds like your church, get a proposal or book a call. We work with churches and nonprofits across the Philadelphia suburbs.
