Why We Redesigned the OurChurch.Com Website and How It`s Producing Results

OurChurch.Com is excited to announce the official launch of our newly redesigned website. The launch is a fitting segue between our “Start with Why” series of blog posts in January and our February theme of Web Design Month.

Start With Why

The “Start With Why” philosophy is that while most organizations start by telling you what they do an appeal to their audience’s self-interest, inspiring leaders and organizations start by telling you why they do what they do and invite you to join their cause.

OurChurch.Com believes in partnering with other Christian organizations to help them achieve their mission online. That’s our cause. So, the OCC site was redesigned in several ways to “Start With Why.”

• The motto below our logo was changed from “Because the church is the people” to “Achieve your mission online.
• On our homepage and the main page of each section of our site – web design, web hosting, search marketing and advertising services – we replaced content that promoted our services with graphics showing quotes from ministries who we have helped achieve their mission online.
• Further down on the homepage, we added a “Why Choose OurChurch.Com” box and included our mission statement next to it.

Simple and Beautiful

We believe that the simpler a website is the better. However, we also wanted to include color and creativity in the site so that people interested in having us develop a custom designed website for them would immediately know we are capable of creating a stunning website for them. To achieve both simple and beautiful, we designed the site itself to be very simple and include a lot of white space and put color and creativity into the content – the slides you see just below the header.

A few more things we did to simplify our site. We…

• Reduced the number of items in each menu
• Placed the consultation request form at the bottom of every page in our design, SEO and advertising sections (previously the bottom of each page had a link to a separate consultation request form)
• Drastically reduced the number of items in the consultation request form.

The results couldn’t be more dramatic! The number of people completing the consultation request forms has more than tripled!

Better Social Media Integration

One other significant improvement made to the new site is the addition of the social media sharing buttons on the left side of every page. Not only is social media an important source of new visitors, but search engines are factoring Tweets, likes and +1s into their ranking algorithms, so it’s important to encourage and facilitate as much Tweeting, liking, sharing and +1ing as we can.

In fact, would you please take a moment to Tweet, like and +1 our homepage right now?

We Covet Your Comments!

While we’re super excited about our new site, we also recognize that our opinions and our user experience on the site is secondary in importance to yours. Please tell us what you think of the new site – good and bad.

• How does it look to you? Do you feel like we achieved simple and beautiful?
• Can you immediately understand our “why” – our mission – when you first arrive on our site?
• Are you able to quickly and easily find our way around our site?
• Did you run across any problems? Any misspellings, broken links, confusing text?

Thanks for taking a look at our new site! And thanks for the feedback!

In His Service,
Paul Steinbrueck, CEO

Paul Steinbrueck

Co-founder & CEO, OurChurch.Com

Paul has been the CEO of OurChurch.Com since its founding in 1996, combining his passion for faith and technology to lead the organization.

An accomplished writer, Paul has authored over 2,000 articles on faith and technology, featured on platforms like ChurchLeaders.com, The JoyFM, and his personal blog, LiveIntentionally.org.

Beyond his professional achievements, Paul serves as an elder at Journey Community Church and is deeply engaged in his community through his involvement with the Florida Sheriffs Youth Ranch and the Safety Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is a contributing author of the book Outspoken! Conversations on Church Communication.