"We are thrilled with our new website from Church Pages. It has totally transformed our communication in so many ways. It was great working with you and Church Pages - so very patient, understanding, insightful and creative. It was thrilling to see the new site emerge. The layout is great - clear, contemporary, relevant and upbeat. Making all the connections with Church Suite is also enabling much better all round communication and administration for us. It is all and more that we hoped for, and is a central part of our moving forward as a church community post pandemic, and how we want to present our mission and ministry.

Thank you so much!"

Revd Ian Tomkins Vicar, St Matthew's Church, Bristol

St Matthew's Church, Bristol is a warm and welcoming church located in Kingsdown. The church desires to worship God and to encourage growth in faith and service of the community.

How the website was designed and built

Revd Ian Tomkins approached Church Pages with some questions about our website software. He wanted to know how easy it was to edit and whether it would work with ChurchSuite. We worked closely with Ian for some considerable time as he took the church on a gentle journey towards understanding that the church would benefit from a more modern website before an application to have a website was made.

The church was blessed with help from an ordinand Rob Cromwell, who had clear ideas as to what the church's demographic needed from a website. We worked closely with him to create a completely new website that wasn't quite bespoke, but benefitted from new elements that had not been used in a templated Church Pages design before.

It was very important to St Matthew's that the emphasis of the website was functionality on a mobile. We therefore decreased line length, used graphic blocks to help navigation, and integrated seamlessly  with ChurchSuite. The site was based on the Isaiah template, but was tweaked to give the site a more bespoke look.

The finished website benefits from:

• A modern, clean, and user-friendly website
• A responsive site designed specifically for mobiles
• Seamless integration with ChurchSuite - see Events Page
• Sign up for Alpha that links directly to ChuchSuite
• Embedded YouTube videos for services and thoughts
• Optimisation

What else did Church Pages do?

We worked closely with St Matthews to source images that were shot in Bristol and reflected the content of the site. We added in optimisation to the website, and gave training on how to edit the software. In addition we suggested that the church might want to use Google not for profit email, which they had not heard of, but provided the ideal solution for them.

We also added in web stats.

How did the website go live?

Once the church was happy with the finished site, and training had been undertaken on how to make changes to the site, St Matthews made us their name servers so that we could make the site live.

Conclusion

The website is providing an excellent platform for the church to engage with its community. It has been well received by the congregation and has improved the churches communication. You can see the site here.