Case Study: The new (and award-winning) Calvary Church Website

A website re-build often starts when a business contacts us with a need: a subtle rebranding, better user experience, a modern facelift. Maybe the company leaders aren’t happy with their search engine rankings, or they want to feature new products, or add new user-friendly features into their site. There are many reasons why websites go through transformations. No matter what those reasons are, at Synapse we work with our clients to make sure they receive a website that they can be proud of and that will engage their visitors. That’s why we invest ample time upfront in listening to our clients’ goals and doing research before we ever present a proposal for them to consider.

So what do you do when you are working on a website and your client is 1,000 miles away from your home office? Well, that’s what we found out when we started building the website for Calvary Church in Inverness, Florida.

When we build a website we go through an extensive planning process with our client and our internal teams. Our goal is to to make sure that all levels of our organization understand our client’s vision and that our client can feel assured that we understand their goals. That’s why when Calvary Church sought our expertise, we were excited to get the chance to take their current website to the next new level. Our design team not only created a whole new look to the website, but came up with new logos for the church and their existing ministries, re-wrote existing copy, and built in exciting features that would attract new visitors to the church.

Engaging visitors is always one of focal points for every website we create, so our content strategy team worked diligently to make the site easily readable and interesting. For example, our researcher selected Bible verses which coincided with the pages the user was on and then directs the user to an online version of the New International Version of the Bible. We built a custom blog, calendar of events and an application that allows a visitor to listen to, download and share past sermons.

“When we started developing content for the Calvary Church, we had several phone interviews with their team in Florida to understand their vision,” explained Mike Deraco, lead content strategist. “We took their message and wrote content designed to engage their visitors, and is also search engine friendly – which will help search engine optimization.”

While putting the finishing touches on the new website, we were notified that we had won a platinum MarCom Award for the creativity, concept and production of the new Calvary Church site – chosen from more than 6,000 entries. Our team was thrilled to learn this news and share it with Calvary. It also validated our approach: regardless of the type of business our client is in, the Synapse team pours our heart and soul into every project.

“Being recognized by the AMCP and MarCom Awards judges for the Calvary Church website is a huge achievement for Synapse – as well as for Calvary,” explains Bobby Deraco, Synapse’s CEO and lead marketing strategist. “The geographic area in which Calvary is located is rich with churches and other places of worship. We hope that our efforts will pique a visitor’s interest and help them find their way to Calvary. They are an outstanding group of people who do great work in their community and we were honored to have created a new website in which they can be proud.”

For this website redesign and development project, a sampling of services we provided to Calvary Church were:

• Complete website design and web content overhaul
• Extensive user experience design and testing
• Custom blog platform with calendar system
• Custom audio sermon application with social sharing features
• Paypal integration for online tithing
• Custom form development for group sign-up, prayer requests and contact forms

This award-winning website could not have been built without the support of the Calvary Church team in Inverness, Florida. Check it out at www.invernesscalvary.com.

Want to work with an award-winning marketing firm that will start your website with the question: “What goals do you want to achieve with your new site?” Then, start a conversation with Synapse today!