Community Evangelical Free Church Website Replatform

Context#

Community Evangelical Free Church needed to replace an aging website that had become expensive to run and difficult for internal staff to maintain. The congregation serves a wide range of ages, so the new site had to stay welcoming and easy to navigate for visitors who are not particularly tech-savvy, while still giving the church office a straightforward way to keep content current — service times, events like Vacation Bible School, sermons, and giving information.

Role#

I led the migration end to end: auditing the existing site, planning the move to a modern, lower-cost platform, rebuilding the design system to stay on-brand, and setting up the admin experience the staff would use going forward.

Constraints#

• A non-technical staff would be the ones editing the site day to day, so the admin experience had to be simple and forgiving
• The visual identity — logo, colors, tone — needed to carry over so the transition felt seamless to the congregation
• The audience skews toward a wide age range, so navigation and legibility took priority over anything clever
• Budget mattered — part of the point of the migration was to lower ongoing hosting and platform costs

Approach#

I rebuilt the site on a modern stack chosen specifically to cut recurring platform costs compared to the old setup, while pairing it with a content-editing workflow the church office could use without developer help. The design carried over the existing branding — logo, green color palette, and photography style — into a cleaner, more legible layout, with clear calls to action for visiting, giving, and viewing events like the annual Vacation Bible School program.

Outcome#

The church now runs on a platform that costs less to maintain and is fully editable by internal staff, with a homepage that leads with a clear welcome, service information, and current events, and full brand continuity from the previous site.