This week we launched the new mobberly.org.
This has been a 9 month process. The old website was massive, and had become very dated in appearance and functionality. So we needed to updated it.
But we didn’t have a budget to hire a company to update it. So we decided to do it ourselves. Because we have other jobs, we knew it would take a while. Here’s the process we used.
1. In January we began tracking how people used our current website. We identified what people wanted to see. And we identified the content we thought was important that people were not seeing. We also found many pages that no one was visiting.
2. We also began talking with ministries, asking them to dream about their pages. We asked them to look at their content.
3. And we looked at other churches, looked at what they were doing on their websites.
We took a day to retreat and work through the data we had collected. We came up with a 2-fold purpose for our website, and 4 priorities to consider when making a new one.
The purpose of our site is to:
1. Help new people find out about our church
2. Be an Information hub for attenders
Our priorities were:
1. Mobile friendly
2. Guest friendly
3. East to navigate
4. Simple
65% of people visiting our website use a phone or tablet. So a responsive site is critical for us. The other priorities were straight forward.
We began to lay out our new site. We used our Strategies as touch points for the menu. We made campus pages with campus specific information, so people can find the information that relates to them. Once we knew how the site would look, we went to find a company that could allow us to build it.
In the Summer, I started trying out some web companies. It several attempts before I found one that could do everything we wanted. We settled on thechurchco.com. They have been very responsive, and our site is awesome.
So then it was time to build. I built the basic menu structure, and then pages, and then began to move content, edit content, create content. Initially we just used stock images. but as the site began to take shape, we started changing those out for our own. My Assistant Director spent a lot of time capturing new images of ministry here.
Finally, we launched and had all of our ministries go and proof their pages. We asked them to send one email with lists of corrections. (Not several emails…) I’ve made quite a few tweaks and corrections this week.
Today we had our first Sunday. On a whim I checked last weeks Analytics and noted the most used links on the old page. I made some redirects for the new page. In the space of an hour I saw 54 hits on the live video streaming link. Apparently a lot of people had bookmarked the old stream page.
I’m pretty proud of the new site. We worked hard, and thought things through. I think it will be a big improvement for us.
Scott Link Media 