Green's Farms Congregational Church
Date: Spring 2014
In 2014, our friends at Green's Farms Congregational Church contacted Alex about doing some work on their website. This project became a major catalyst for motivating our work at Soren because of what we found: GFC had recently completed a major website redesign, but they were paying as astronomical sum of money for access to a sub-par content management system with no customer support to speak of.
Rather than take on the maintenance of their existing, far-too-expensive website, we pitched something different: rebuilding substantially the same site on a much less expensive platform that would also be easier to maintain. We recommended using WordPress and calculated that the project would reduce their hosting costs by 96% per year, making the up-front investment fully worthwhile.
More than any other, this project "created" Soren. Having seen up-close the scarcity of good resources for our churches and nonprofits in the technology space, we became highly motivated to offer better solutions. Our goal became to help our clients make the best use of web technology in the most cost effective ways possible.
This project also allowed us to add some new features to the site that enabled GFC to use it to maximum potential. In particular, we added a calendar plugin to the site which allowed for direct syncing between the internally used Google Calendars and the website, streamlining the process for adding new event listings and announcements (a major part of the church's website maintenance work).
Another very important feature for the church is the ability to register for Sunday School directly on the website. GFC's Sunday School is one of it's most important programs, and streamlining the administrative work around it was an extremely important consideration.
Additional features added to the site as part of this project include an updated staff/leadership page, more robust staff biographies, contact forms for wedding reservations, and customized sidebars for individual sections of the site to help visitors navigate contextually.
