Community Evangelical Church
The Challenge
When I sat down with Community EC, they were looking for a site that could serve as a “single source of truth.” The design was important. They wanted to make a great first impression and be proud of their site, but they ultimately wanted a site that was functional, easy to navigate, and easy to update.
The mix of volunteers and paid staff were ready for a change to their website.
Church sites have to cover a lot of bases. They have to serve many different audiences simultaneously, but they have to avoid being too bloated and complex. Too often, church sites can become like scaffolding thrown together by an inexperienced contractor. They build to reach a bunch of different areas and solve a bunch of different problems. Each problem is solved in turn, but, when you step back and look at it, it looks like a haphazard mess. I don’t know if this illustration makes sense to anyone but me, but you know what I mean.
“Church sites have to cover a lot of bases. They have to serve many different audiences simultaneously, but they have to avoid being too bloated and complex.”
Our Strategy
For Community EC’s new site, my goal was for the site’s visitors to be able to easily find what they were looking for on a beautiful site. I wanted them to feel like they could easily get to know the church and find the answers to their questions.
In order to do this, we started by selecting welcoming and calming color palette,
– Big bold typography for headings and callouts
– A color palette with a “construction” type color as the hero
– Rough texture backgrounds used in a subtle way
– Hand-drawn/marker style elements used to highlight words and show strategy (arrows, underlines, boxes, etc)
The main Call-to-Action Todd wanted visitors to notice is his Group Coaching program. We highlighted this in the main navigation and throughout the site. We also designed an entire landing page highlighting his Group Coaching.
A secondary Call-to-Action is the free trainings he offers. You’ll see this highlighted in the main hero and towards the bottom of the homepage.
Lastly, he wanted to highlight his podcast, so we made a large section on the homepage highlighting the podcast with various short quotes from satisfied listeners.
