Case Study
Friends of Friendless Churches
Charity website design & build for an organisation that rescues places of worship throughout England & Wales.
Project Background
Church Charity Website Design & WordPress Development
We were honoured to be approached by Rachel Morley at Friends of Friendless Churches to re-design & build their new website.
This is a great charity that aims to rescue churches and other places of worship from the ravages of time.
Being completely reliant on membership fees and donations from the public, this charity is working hard to save historic buildings for us all to enjoy for years to come.
Charity Website Development Brief
THE
CHALLENGE
Friends of Friendless Churches were struggling with an old WordPress website that was poorly executed and difficult to manage.
Site performance was lacking on several fronts:
- Slow page-load times.
- Cluttered navigation/header that confused the visitor and used too much screen space.
- Too many clicks to access content, such as blog posts that also opened in a new tab/window.
- Too many pages that lacked focus and made it difficult to find certain information
The client also found updating the site to be a slightly frustrating process, with a poorly organise CMS and not enough flexibility for the creation of different pages.
Our brief was not only to produce a nicer design for the front-end but to also build a CMS that was much easier to use and a site that performed much faster in the browser.
Bespoke WordPress website with detailed location search
THE
SOLUTION
We often find that many clients would ideally like to avoid WordPress if they’ve already had a bad experience with the platform. But what’s key to remember is that it’s not the CMS that is the problem, it’s the way that the developer has implemented the CMS.
With this in mind, we assured Friends of Friendless Churches that a completely fresh WordPress install that was stripped of all unnecessary code would form the perfect foundation for the new website.
With a custom WordPress theme design that was lightweight and hosted on our environmentally-friendly hosting platform, we could deliver fast page-load times and industry-level security.
Website improvements and functions include:
- Search by town, city, postcode or your specific location
- Google Maps integration
- Integration with Mailchimp
- English and Welsh languages provided by Google Translate integration
- Flexible page creation using multiple types of content blocks
- Video embedding
- Image gallery carousels
- PDF downloads
- Instagram Feed
Our modern and fresh website design helps bring the FoFC in line with other charities and heritage operators.
We’re extremely happy with the results and look forward to working with FoFC again in the future.
“LWDA took great care to understand our organisation and our aims, they implemented these expertly. It was a real delight to work with LWDA, and our new site has all new integrated functionality we need, is easy to use for both our staff and visitors to the site, and looks so attractive. Sincere thanks to LWDA for helping us to achieve this.“
