I’ve been involved in the design and project management of what feels like countless church sites and they are never an easy task. The main ongoing frustration for the church is the sheer width of target audience. No other product, organisation of charity have this problem quite like the church does. We generally try to build sites that attempt to cater for two every different types of people, the Christians and the not. The obvious problem with this is that in doing both, neither get done well.

But whats the answer?

Well we are either attempting to do something truly ridiculous or simply genius (I guess we will find out soon which one!) with our new site by homing in hard on one audience. Potentially surprisingly we want to target is the un-churched. 

This enables us to build and tailor every part of the site with the true end-user in mind, no compromise, no apology. This simple change frees us up from most of the ‘conventional’ way of presenting a church site. It gives us freedom to create a congestion tone voice, it enables us to cut out pages and pages of content, and presents us with a clean slate to focus consistently in one direction.

Once we launch we will post a little more detail about your approach to the project…

Which brings us to one small part of our new site which we think is a bit of a gear change for the traditional church site. The Attic is a short film we have created to take the place of the 'Start Here' or ‘I’m new here’ tab which usually sits somewhere on the homepage. 

The point of it is simple really. Before we overload the user with loads of venue content and service times, we want to help them understand that there is a Father that knows them and loves them. Sometime visitors to our sites are just not ready to come on a Sunday so they can be quick to ‘click in’ and ‘click out’ again. We would love to think that the approach of the Attic could help to take them a step further into their journey of discovering God, way before they have even considered coming on a Sunday. 

We are launching the site in October and will share a little more about the making of the film here then, in the mean time here are a few stills, freshly graded!