A fresh look for your website

These are ideas for a refreshed thepromisechurch.com. They use your own photos and the words already on your site, so you can picture it with your real content. Nothing here is live, and nothing changes unless you want it to.

I'm offering this as a volunteer. There's no charge for the design or the build.

Three looks for the home page

Same content and photos, three different personalities. Pick the one that feels most like The Promise Church, or mix and match.

Other pages

These are shown in Look A, but any of the looks could carry through.

The trade-off

The new look is only half of it. The other half is whether the time it saves your team is worth getting used to a new way of editing. Here's an honest picture of both sides.

What gets easier

  • Events go in onceAdd an event and it shows on the events page, the home page and the right ministry page, then drops off after it's over.
  • Sermons post themselvesThe latest service and each campus's message appear on their own from your YouTube channel and podcast.
  • "Live now" turns on by itselfWhen the Sunday stream starts on YouTube, a banner appears across the site with a link to watch.
  • Pages are hard to breakYour team fills in simple fields and picks from pre-designed sections, so pages look right no matter who edits them.
  • Planning Center stays as it isGiving, prayer requests, forms, groups and sign-ups keep working exactly the way they do today.

What gets harder

  • A new editor to learnIn Squarespace you click and type right on the page. The new editor (called Sanity) is a set of forms with a preview beside them. It's simpler once it clicks, but it feels less direct at first.
  • Less freedom on the pageThe same guardrails that keep things clean mean you can't drag in any layout you like. A brand-new kind of section is something I'd add for you.
  • Changes aren't instantThe preview reloads to show each change instead of updating as you type. After you publish, the public site takes a minute or two to update.
  • Some features cost extraThe free version covers a lot, but scheduling posts ahead of time and limited "editor only" logins are on the paid plan, about $15 per person each month.
  • You'd rely on me for bigger changesContent is yours to edit, but changes to the design or new features would come through me. Everything would be set up in the church's own accounts, so someone else could take it over if needed.

A few fixes for your current site

While gathering your content, I spotted a few things worth fixing now, whatever you decide about a redesign.

On a phone

Home, look A

Home, look B

Home, look C

Events

Event page