Trinity Lutheran Church

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Trinity Lutheran Church is a church based on Crete, Illinois, and so happens to be my current employer. Aside from UI changes, the website lacked in usability, information architecture, and content strategy. Under my Technology Director role, and with my boss knowing I’m also a UX Designer, I recommended we refresh the website. After some upfront suggestions, I was immediately given the green light.

PROBLEM

Like a lot of churches, Trinity had an outdated website and was trying to speak to “unchurched” people with religious terminology. Aside from sprucing up the website with UX and UI to make it look modern, content strategy and information architecture was going to make or break the new website. On top of the religious terminology, the IA was, well, atrocious. There was really no clear direction to the website.

OBJECTIVE

Redesign the church website with a focus on “unchurched” users

DELIVERABLES

• Primary research

• Information architecture

• Content strategy

PRIMARY RESEARCH

Using website analytics from the old website, knowing practically the entire congregation, following the direction of my superior, and referring to my notes from a marketing trip to three other WELS churches the summer prior, it was pretty evident what the new website needed — clarity and understanding for newcomers to the religious space and a consistent platform for current members to view and access various resources.

I want to also touch on a very interesting discovery from the marketing trip to those three other churches — “unchurched people don’t know what the word ‘gospel’ means”. This quote, from Dr. John Parlow of St. Mark Lutheran Church, really hit home and set the foundation for Trinity’s content strategy with the website redesign. Another way of putting it is that you can’t speak a language to someone who doesn’t understand that language. It simply became the baseline for how we should be talking with newcomers to the religious space. I even took a step further and brought this point up at one of our staff meetings, urging my colleagues and leaders of the church to use this phrase as a foundation for not only our online presence, but for everything, whether that’s talking in person, welcoming new people, and even changing the verbiage in sermons and devotions.

The active congregation at Trinity is only about 350 people, but our website traffic was anywhere between 2,000-5,000 unique visitors per month, meaning the vast majority of our website presence was to people that don’t know us. With that said, we primarily focused on the initial user experience to people that don’t know about Trinity, inline with the new content strategy. The initial experience is to make newcomers feel welcome and to help them better understand what Trinity offers, teaches, and lives by.

To keep the already active congregation familiar with the new website, we kept some terminology that we used in the previous website the same, ultimately to help ease some potential confusion as to where some information might lie.

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

The old sitemap was very gaudy and inconcise. Much of the existing content could have been combined, so we did just that, combining 83 pages down to just 32. Working with my superior and the assistant pastor, we also prioritized content for both the newcomers to the religious space and our current members.

SKETCHES & PROTOTYPE

I sketched the homepage and content heavy pages, as these seemed like the most viable pages to get an initial visual on. All of the other pages are your regular-style, text and gallery pages. After some initial feedback on the sketches from the entire staff, I took some notes and immediately moved forward to the rapid prototype.

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Once the prototype (MVP) was complete, I presented the MVP to the entire church staff. After some great insight and changes, I got the green light to launch.

With the new website analytics, I can happily say that the website is flourishing and that interaction and conversions are at an all-time high. In certain areas, our conversions have even grown by 25 times, just in the first month of launch.

PROJECT WINDUP

Without a doubt, Trinity’s website redesign is the most impactful project I’ve ever been apart of. The platform reaches thousands per month and is truly crushing it, in terms of analytics. I was very proud to be part of this project and look forward to maintaining the new website.

FUTURE IDEAS

• Discover other types of integration we can implement to increase usability and accessibility

WHAT I'VE LEARNED

• Aside from research guiding your design choices, some super basic UX changes can truly cause great conversions, such as having a button versus a text link

• It’s all about the bigger picture. Who’s your target audience? What message do you want to relay? Before I came around, the website was indeed tailored to newcomers, but not in the way it should’ve been.