A New Website for All Saints with Holy Trinity Church

A bit of background

All Saints with Holy Trinity Loughborough, are a traditional church of England Church community situated in the centre of Loughborough. As the established Parish church of the town, they have been serving the wider town and its people for centuries. In more recent years, the Rector Revd. Wendy Dalrympal and the governing trustees have been working to create a more definitive identity for the church.

In many ways they have accomplished this, however, All Saints approached us looking to update their existing website. Although they had already established a brand, this was not reflected in their current site. The current site was functional but complicated to update and was beginning to look dated.

The Challenge

It was clear from the outset that usability and ease of updating the website was key to the success of this project. Throughout the covid pandemic, the struggle to keep the old site updated caused problems as flexibility and agility was key in responding to continuous changes in policies.

For the new site, the admin area needed to be clear and user friendly so that a time-strapped admin team, with limited knowledge of web design, could keep it looking great and up to date. In particular, was the need for easy editing of what events were happening where from week to week.

As a quick solution to the old site and following the lockdown All Saints had made a relatively successful move onto social media. This meant that they had generated rich media like video and audio, as well as starting to use Mailchimp to give regular updates as the church magazine was seen as a risk to distribute to more vulnerable church members. They wanted the ability to collate rich media, hosted from various settings, into one area on the site. They also needed the ability to collect contacts securely.

Lastly, the funding for the new website was conditional on highlighting their inclusive and diverse community, this meant creating a design that was both authentic and flexible so that as the community grew and changed to reflect the local intercultural community, they could create more diverse content, including different languages, and be easy to navigate and explore for a broad demographic.

Our Approach

With all our projects we begin with a kick-off meeting in order to get to know the client team on the project and gain a deeper understanding of what will contribute to the success of the project. Through this process, we can clearly begin to see what is most important to them and identify the challenges that need overcoming.

From this meeting, it was clear to us that the ability to manage content themselves was incredibly important to the team.

In order to achieve this, we create websites with a content management system called Twill. Our CMS creates an intuitive, powerful, and flexible publishing experience. Rather than focusing on WYSIWYG boxes, which can be restricted or complicated to format pages, Twill uses a variety of custom-built components across a range of page templates.

This meant that we could quickly agree on a sitemap of exactly what pages would be needed and what blocks each page would need, with a clear outline of how each block would function. Our developers were then able to build these blocks and pages, with the result being a set of clear templates and content blocks that could be easily generated and rearranged to achieve a content layout that looked amazing and could be easily updated.

The focus of the build was particularly around the custom ‘What’s on Page’ which was able to:

Show every event at All Saints in a clear and easy to understand format
Generate multiple iterations of a single event in order to reduce repetitive work tasks
Automatically promote these events on the homepage
Give the option to highlight specific events
Use filters to help the user select the events they are most interested in
Include the ability to provide service sheets in different languages which are easy to edit and accessible

Additional features we created specifically for All Saints were:

An expanding video frame on the homepage to tell their story
Creating rich media blocks to host video and audio in their ‘Resource Hub’ area
A highlighted donations page
Custom web Icons to show categories for resources and areas of the site such as life events like wedding marriages and funerals
A clear and friendly team page to introduce the various team members
A contact form with the ability to sign up users for All Saint’s monthly Mailchimp newsletter.

The Result

The final website was launched on New Year's Eve 2021, just in time for the New Year and a fresh start. The All Saints team had already become increasingly excited by the design but had not fully expected just how simple and easy the site would be to keep up to date and edit.

The new site is far more sophisticated than the original website, and yet able to be edited, by members of the admin team who were not previously confident in this role.

The team were impressed by the modern and yet authentic traditional and historical feel of the new website. The new site has received great feedback from the wider community, and its ability to have content shaped and rearranged to create a mix of page types for the Resource Hub has already sparked a number of ideas for greater community engagement and opportunities for learning.