St. Matthias Roman Catholic Church is a vibrant and growing church community in northwest Indiana. Established in 1966, the church is focused on bringing people of all ages to Christ.
St. Matthias approached TBH Creative about doing a redesign. Their leadership team wanted to better meet their parishioners’ needs by creating a new website that:
- Better represents the church and its mission
- Simplifies maintenance tasks for busy church staff
- Improves user experience
- Features updated content (design and messaging)
The solution—
TBH Creative’s website redesign for St. Matthias included:
- Website strategy
- Responsive website design
- Web development (HTML and CSS build)
- Content creation
- Content management system
Launch date: Summer 2017
Q&A
We chatted via email about the web redesign project with Jackie Gentry, pastoral associate at St. Matthias, and TBH Creative project lead, Tatum Hindman. Their responses—below—have been condensed and edited.
Why was St. Matthias searching for website redesign help?
Jackie: We are an active, growing church, and it was our desire to have a website that actually reflects the overall joy and action taking place within our faith community. We needed support to help create an updated web presence would engage online seekers and reflect our church’s identity.
What did TBH Creative do to help St. Matthias meet its website marketing goals?
Jackie: TBH Creative has a comprehensive process based on years of experience, and this process helped us think through every step of our web presence and develop a clear definition of our goals. Their plan of action and guidance ensured we would not be haphazard in our approach to making the decisions that come with creatively marketing our community online.
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What does the St. Matthias team think of the finished website?
Jackie: St. Matthias and its entire leadership team are thrilled with our new website’s results. Not only are we seeing a huge increase in relevant online traffic, but the website perfectly represents who we are to our online visitors.
The website has become so much more than that, though. It is now a tool used by our parishioners to keep track of the many opportunities in the parish, as well as to learn about ways to connect and serve others. We are finally proud to give our web address out! TBH Creative made that a reality.
“TBH Creative’s plan of action and guidance ensured we would not be haphazard in our approach to making the decisions that come with creatively marketing our community online..”
What helped make this church website redesign project successful?
Tatum Hindman: St. Matthias’ staff was so excited about the project and—from the start—they were 100% invested in helping get us quick and thoughtful feedback to ensure we had what we needed to do a good job and be successful in our work. They had some clear ideas of functionality and design treatments that they wanted as part of this project (e.g., they knew they wanted to present news and events in a “tiled” format), but they were open to exploring different solutions that could support meeting their website marketing goals. During training, they were eager to dive in and learn how to keep the site’s content fresh, quickly learning how to use the CMS tools.
