Holy Trinity, a Lutheran church community in Fremont, California, is a non-profit with a small staff and a number of volunteers. When the pandemic hit in March 2020, the community’s activities came to a complete halt. In-person services, events, ministry, and outreach all stopped. Fortunately, HTLC had already implemented a website redesign with help from Dovergence. The community moved seamlessly online, using the website blog to provide constant updates to the community, information on how to contact the now-closed office and connect with leadership, and links to weekly services that were now being recorded and moved online.
Building or redesigning a website, even a small one, can feel like a daunting task.
I’ve actually done it before, more than once, but with a team to support me. So when the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church (HTLC) council asked me, as the newly appointed communications liaison, to overhaul the church’s 7-year-old website, I thought, “Sure. I can do that.”
Building a website
There are a few things to consider. I started with the things I knew I could handle — how should the content be organized? What sort of tone should the writing have? Where did existing information still work, and where did I need to update the text? And what should I do about photos?
What I didn’t know how to approach was the back-end work.
Enter Dovergence.
In working with Jeremy Ashley and his company, a host of possibilities and options opened up to help me push this project to the finish line. In fact, the biggest obstacle I faced actually came from the church council, whose members didn’t understand the process of rebuilding the website, which delayed the implementation by a few weeks.
Here’s what Dovergence offered my church community:
- Design expertise, which helped iron out the bumps in what the website had been, what it was on the way to becoming as the redesign project kicked off, and room to develop and grow as needed.
- A professional user experience, something a non-profit like ours likely would not have known to embrace.
- Code! As part of the design process, our content was added into vetted, complete JavaScript code that worked well with the design and could be moved to the platform of our choice.
- A platform. We started on Amazon Web Services, which was also hosting our domain, and while I had a lot of learning to do, I was able to create an initial home for our website and domain. Dovergence then moved us to a new home where they could help manage all of the things I was missing — updates, regular maintenance, and more.
Freedom to focus
Our work with Dovergence took the lion’s share of the things I was worried about off my plate, so I was free to focus on adding content to our website. We built an online community that sustained us throughout 15 months of sheltering in place in California during the pandemic, and later saw us through a return to in-person activities. We have emerged with new digital tools at our fingertips and a healthy appreciation for sustained communication. We not only served our community here in Fremont, but we reconnected with members of our community who had moved, using our new tools to share our message and expand our reach effortlessly.
When I first took on the communications liaison job, the pastor sent me examples of his “wishlist” site, and I laughed. Sure, I said, if we hire a big team.
Now I’m walking that comment back. Because he’s really happy.
And we’ve done everything on the Dovergence platform.