With the message “There’s a place for you at Trinity,” this week we launched a new website aimed at people who are seeking a church or are interested in coming back to Trinity after an absence, whether they’re interested in Sunday services, music programs, or other offerings of our church.
At the end of 2021, Trinity decided to redesign its website for several reasons: to update its look to keep up with current trends in visual design of websites, to make the site easier to use on a phone, and to fill a gap in the church’s communications for newcomers and returnees. Since I had designed Trinity’s last website in 2013, I was pleased that the church accepted my proposal to launch a redesigned site this year.
Rector AJ Heine along with a committee of parishioners including Kristin Boody, BJ Regi, and my wife Lindsay Curren, who handles communications for the church, agreed with me that the church needed a better way to reach out to people who are not currently active with Trinity.
We already offer several ways to reach parishioners and visitors who come to services and attend church events on a regular basis. These include:
- Printed announcements in the service bulletin each Sunday morning
- Paper flyers posted around church buildings
- Weekly email newsletter
- Daily social media posts on Instagram and Facebook
- Email lists from groups such as choirs and reading groups
While such communications tools are effective to reach Trinity insiders, those who are looking for a church or those who haven’t come to Trinity in a few years are less likely to encounter our regular communications.
Today’s spiritual seeker or music lover is likely to do a Google search to find a Sunday service, religious education program, or concert to meet their needs. And that Google search will take them either to a Google business listing for our church or to our website. We wanted to make sure that when web searchers found our site that it was ready to answer their questions about Trinity.
The goal of reaching out to new or returning people informed the way we organized the new website, highlighting the offerings of the church that web users are most likely to seek out online, according to an analysis of other Episcopal church websites and a decade’s worth of visitor traffic statistics for Trinity’s own site showing which pages were most popular.
Thus, the new website makes it as easy to find out what time our Sunday services take place as it does to connect people to Christian formation classes for both children and adults and to introduce visitors to Trinity’s esteemed and extensive music program.
And because one of the first things that people interested in a new church want to know about is that church’s clergy, we highlighted Father AJ right on the homepage.
One of the things that makes Trinity different from other local churches is our historic buildings and grounds. Knowing that these will have special interest to newcomers, we tried to convey the beauty of our historic downtown location with two photo galleries, a general collection of Trinity over four seasons and a special gallery depicting our Tiffany stained glass windows.
Technology-wise, the new site is also optimized for speed, security and ease of maintenance. To that end, we removed pages with low traffic or outdated information. Slimming down the site has left us with fewer but better pages that will be easier to maintain in the future.
Though the site is optimized for newcomers and returnees, we have tried to include information useful to active Trinity parishioners and visitors as well. In particular, we have added a streamlined way for parishioners to request help from Lindsay to publicize an upcoming church-related event. The new marketing events form will help make sure that accurate and complete information on upcoming events is available with enough lead time to get the word out effectively. We will plan to hold a session soon to introduce features of the new design to parishioners who are in charge of planning events.
For active Trinity people, the events calendar and recent blog post links both displayed prominently on the homepage should also be helpful.
We hope you enjoy the new Trinity website. As with any online resource, the site is a work in progress. If you have ideas to improve it, just let us know via our contact form.