I had experience in working with already made templates, so to begin designing pages from the beginning was a welcomed adventure! Our old website was static, unappealing and did not serve to maximize our outreach to seekers and usability among our parishioners. Our growing parish knew it was time to give our website a makeover.
As providence would have it, a woman who visited our parish happened to have worked for Image Factory. She found us on the web, but saw how poor our website was. She approached our parish about designing a new website template to demonstrate how a striking, yet functional website could impact our parish growth and presence on the web. She designed a basic template to demonstrate the color palette, artistic elements and function of the pages/navigation, based on the feel of our parish community. She was spot on! Once parish council agreed to pursue a website make over, it was my job to be responsible for all communication with Image Factory from beginning to end. The most amazing part was all my correspondence was communicated by e-mail, by my choice. No phone calls. No physical meeting. Mr. Revesz and his team had no trouble understanding our vision to the design changes to the original template design to make it customized to our needs. This can be very hard to do through email, as it can leave lots of room for interpretation. Mr. Revesz was always very professional and respectful in his response to any questions, inquiries or requests made by our website development team. Most importantly, he was very patient, which is necessary when working with churches. We do not make decisions hastily.
Aside from the fabulous design, our key reason for choosing Image Factory was their “no brainer” Content Management system. I have used many CM’s from other companies… and most were awkward at best. Most CM’s required too many steps or some knowledge in HTML/Visual Basic to make template pages be more personalized. When working with a church community based on volunteerism, it is important to have CM that can be easily learned by users of all ages. Also, I can update our parish information much more quickly than with our previous website. It is very intuitive. I have also increased my knowledge of how to embed video and graphic links into my pages since at the press of a button, I can access the HTML view and figure out where the embedding instructions would go. Very handy for posting You-Tube sermons on a weekly basis, as well as other organizations that have included HTML ready graphics/video to copy and post on websites.
Our website has been “live” since September 2011. Our investment was worth every parishioner donation. We have seen a huge increase in visitor traffic to our site, as well as coming through our church doors. Their primary reason for visiting us? Our webpage spoke to them and they found our site to match the warm feel of parish community, which they hoped to find true. I cannot express our gratefulness that we made this change. Thanks Image Factory!
