Facelift.
When I came on at Forefront 3 years ago, the website, design and branding was dated (all the staff agreed on this one). Everything looked like the mid 90′s and some even earlier looking by design. Now, you might wonder, “Why does a church care about design? Isn’t it about the gospel? Why are we ‘branding’ ourselves?” Great questions. As a church, we don’t brand the gospel. God has done a great job of that and there is nothing in His amazing story telling that we can make better. He’s done a perfect job with it, so no need to mess with what isn’t broke. As a church, we do want people to remember us. Remember the loving message, kind faces, acts of service, moving in the community, etc. So logos, colors, websites, fliers, and more help us break through the noise & chaos people see and hear everyday and they remember us. And, if we’re living like Jesus, they’ll remember Jesus in the process which is our ultimate goal.
So, being remembered and leaving a mark, whether it’s via the web, a flier, serving, sharing life in community, is a huge deal.
So a little over a year ago Forefront went with Clover for our website hosting/design. Now I cannot say enough how impressed we’ve been with the ease of use, mobile interface, and clean design. It just works. The traffic on our website has increased dramatically and part of that is because people feel more than comfortable sending their friends to an easy to use site.
Going into 2010, we wanted to make an even clearer mark and update our look & feel across the board. So, we contacted Clover about a template design that would fit our new look & feel well. We couldn’t be more pleased with the way it turned out. Also, we reformatted our weekly program to reflect the changes on our site. Our online giving interface will also mirror the same look in the coming days. Now, some might say these things are silly, trivial, not kingdom related. But, when a first time person visits the website, we want them to be spurred on to come on a Sunday. Currently, 65% of first time people each week come because of the website. Also, when they pick up a program, we want it to feel just as comfortable as the site they visited earlier in the week.
When it comes to the program, we’ve made a few changes. It is still in the two sided, tri-fold format, but the color scheme & design has changed. The area for the Weekly Study is bigger with a bigger font, the space for serving opportunities & ways to get plugged in is larger, and we changed around the connection card to reflect a more tech-savy generation. Many of the people who are first-timers visit because of Facebook, Google Search for churches, or the website. We want to keep better track of that and so those minor changes reflect it. Very interesting to see the culture shift in how people connect with churches for the first time.
Below is a snapshot of the website & new program design. If you’re a church looking to check this program design out or get it in an editable Photoshop PSD, please email us at info@forefront.org and we can send you the file. Now, the things here are small in the grand scheme of ministry, but they really aid in our impact of changing lives. So glad Forefront is a place that can hold strong the the essentials, yet change organically with things that need to change to reach people.
Jason *over and out*
