St. Thomas Crookes

  • Web

Helping a long-standing and vibrant local church engage with its community

A Vision for 2017

St. Thomas Crookes is a thriving local church with a long history, and serves an important role in its community. Its vision for 2017 was ‘Join Us in Doing Good’, as it sought to engage local people with the outreach work they do in schools, with the homeless and on the streets of Sheffield. Alongside this new message, STC wanted to take the opportunity to refresh their website.

STC enjoyed consistently strong traffic to its previous website, but the user experience was confusing, with content being difficult to navigate and the church’s message being lost. We were commissioned to implement a new website that did more to engage STC’s membership, as well as the local community.

Content Strategy

At Ink & Water, we’re all about great design. But great design isn’t just about how things look. Our first step with STC was to carefully plan out a more intuitive site structure. Simplifying and streamlining the organisation of STC’s content had positive ramifications throughout the rest of the site development. Navigation, for example, was much easier to design, build and, most importantly, use on the new site, thanks to our thorough planning at the outset.

St Thomas Crookes Church Website - Site Structure
Rationalising the relationships between content types was crucial to a successful site update.

A Modern Church Website

Because the new site sits on our managed hosting package, we can offer peace-of-mind to STC by way of automated site backups and one-click restores, with all site updates and new features testable on a staging site (an updatable clone of the live site).

From a user perspective, the new site does a great job of using modern platforms to serve content in an optimised way. Static assets are served via a content-delivery network, STC’s popular podcasts are stored using Amazon’s S3 cloud storage and loading speeds are helped along by advanced page caching.

We would thoroughly recommend Ink & Water. From the start they took time to understand our vision, needs and budget. They walked us through the design process giving us insightful advice and keeping us well informed at all times. We are extremely happy with the look and feel of our new site and wouldn’t hesitate to use them again in the future.
Bryony Wells, Communications Team Leader, St. Thomas Crookes

Our team thoroughly enjoy working with local businesses and organisations; find out more about us and if you’re interested in collaborating on a new web project, get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!