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Giving lift to your church while you sleep.
 It is difficult to overstate the importance of a well-designed site in
today’s increasingly wired world. Every day that goes by, users become
more accustomed to seeing high-quality sites from companies and
organizations they trust. Research shows that many site visitors tend
to equate the perceived competence or excellence of an organization
with their perceptions of the excellence of the site itself.
Whether
this is fair or not, it is the reality we face, and one of the best
tools to influence perceptions of your church intentionally is your Web
site.
Any Web design project is both a creative communication
project and a technology project. This is why we are excited about the
options we offer in both realms: we believe we can give a church the
best of both worlds.
Component One: Strategic Design
Our specialty is the usability/aesthetic/design phase. It is difficult to overstate the importance of a well-designed site. For years, experts thought most users make up their minds about the excellence of a site in 8 to 10 seconds. More recent research has revealed that users’ all-important first impressions (impressions that can be very hard to overcome, by the way) can often be formed in well under one second (in some cases as little as 50 milliseconds, or one-twentieth of a second!).
This means the way a site looks is often the key that will convince someone to stay and explore. It also means that a poorly designed site can really hurt your cause. It is increasingly safe to assume that when people first hear about your church, they will want to check out your Web site as they ponder whether or not they might want to visit. If they find your site to be outdated or poorly designed, they may make the assumption that your church is not the kind of place they want to visit.
Once the visitor decides to stay and explore the site, the next question becomes: what does your site have to offer that might be of interest? This is where technology comes in.
Component Two: Technical Excellence
Because we are a communication design company, we have decided intentionally not to get into the technical side of Web development. But, we have partnered with a couple of technology companies that offer us tremendous technical support and offer our clients a wide range of options when it comes to Web development.
Our trusted, long-time strategic partner in the technology realm, MetaLake, Inc., is a high-end technology company we work with often on custom programming and development projects. They offer completely custom Web development solutions, custom application and database development, as well as the ability to customize and rapidly deploy Web sites using tools available in the Open Source platform. Their developers did an amazing job of quickly building out this Web site, for example, and they host it for us as well.
We also have partnered with Church Plant Media, a Missouri-based firm that has built a creative and powerful Web site solution specifically for church planters. Church Plant Media’s goal is to provide churches with a solution that accurately reflects their brand, while at the same time giving the church full control over the content of their Web site.
Church Plant Media’s solutions make use of “design frames” that we can customize to whatever degree necessary to fit the branded look and feel that has been established by your church. View Church Plant Media’s design frames here.
Keep in mind that we can also create a completely custom-designed solution if that is preferred.
All Web sites we develop are driven by a content management system that enables church volunteers and/or staff members (even if they are fairly non-technical people) to update and edit their sites easily.
Learn more about the technical solutions we offer.
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