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St Luke's Church, Poole

"Church Pages went above and beyond our expectations in terms of their communication with us during the process of creating our new website, bearing patiently with our questions, time delays in getting things done on our side, and in coaching us through the ins and outs of the website.

It was a big step for us to change our website, but doing this with the support of Church Pages, made it manageable and do-able.  We would certainly highly recommend them, and would be more than happy to answer any questions about our experience with Church Pages, and the team."

Kevin Rogers, St Luke's Parkstone

St Luke's Church is a lively and friendly Christian community in Lower Parkstone, Poole. In summer 2017 the church approached us because they wanted their website updating. The church had found their services thriving, and wanted a mobile-friendly website that could be accessed by not only people within the church, but also those in their local community. St Luke's is involved in many local projects and wanted the website to reflect just how warm and welcoming the church is.

Another consideration that they wanted was that the website should be easy to update by people with little experience of using the web. Having heard how Church Pages works, and the vision behind the initiative, St Luke's Church sent in an Application Form and the process of building their new website began.

How the website was designed and built

St Luke's Church decided to choose the Hebron template because it was engaging and had space to include copy about the church. The church worked hard to follow our guidelines on what makes an engaging picture, and understood that any image would have to work on a large 27" screen as well as a smart phone. Members of the congregation stepped up and we were sent a large selection of photos that showed different aspects of the church including images that reflected the warmth of the congregation. Our creative team worked on the photos to optimise them for the web and then these were uploaded.

The finished website has the following features:

  • An engaging home page that clearly shows the welcoming nature of the church.
  • A home page that can be easily edited and is full of information.
  • Sermons uploaded that can be searched by filter.
  • Information on the St Luke's activities with their community.
  • A link to social media so that the website is a useful method of connecting online.

As St Luke's Church watched the website be created this helped them to decided what navigation would be best for visitors and several amends to page positioning occurred. Fortunately this is very easy to achieve with Church Pages and we worked with the team at St Luke's to make sure that they were happy with how the website functioned for them.

We also spent time training the team at St Luke's to help them overcome the fear of websites. Having had a previous website that could only be edited by a technical guru it came as quite a shock how easy Church Pages was to use. However, time was taken to help them build confidence with the system and we were pleased when we saw copy and pictures changing as the team at St Luke's became familiar with Church Pages.

What else did Church Pages do?

We added optimisation tags to the website and put in a link to the church's Facebook page to help web visitors link to St Luke's social media presence. We also added in web stats so the church could determine the number of visitors to the site and what actions they took once they arrived.

How did the website switch from the old one to the new Church Pages website?

We knew that St Luke's Parkstone wanted a simple solution to swapping over their website so we helped them to change the A record of their domain so that the new website would appear.

Conclusion

The team at Church Pages were very happy to have helped St Luke's Church Parkstone create a modern, responsive, and friendly website and have been so pleased to see it being used to encourage the community of Poole to engage with the church.

The new St Luke's Church website can be viewed here.