CBT Church

Brand strategy, website, and client-managed CMS in 2 weeks

Thousands of churches across the country misrepresent themselves online with poor design, cheesy stock photography, and crudely laid out web designs that don't convert.

The CBT Church project was an experiment - a proof-of-concept for a crazy idea.

The idea: orient the staff around a mission, design brand guidelines that represented that mission, deliver a client-managed website that converted website visitors into church visitors, and train the staff on how to sustain it - all in 2 weeks.

13 days, 5 all-nighters, 4 trips to taco bell at 2am, and 3,000+ mg of caffeine later, I had proven the concept.

Here's a look at how I did it.

The Approach

1. Strategy
2. Brand Guidelines
3. Web Design
4. Web Development
5. Staff CMS Training

Strategy

Workshops

We kicked off day 1 with 6 hours of brand strategy (and lots of carb-laden snacks). Once our brains were fried, we called it a day and came back fresh the next morning - wrapping up around noon on the second day.

We covered 9 different brand strategy exercises:

• Purpose
• Vision
• Values
• Audience
• Market
• Touchpoints
• Personality
• Voice
• Tagline

Brief

After the workshops were complete, I spent the remainder of day 2 drafting and delivering the strategy brief. The brief contained the summation of our workshops as well as 3 moodboards that would influence the visual direction of the project.

Brand Guidelines

On days 3 and 4, I created and delivered the brand guidelines based on what we had uncovered in our strategy workshops.

Web Design

After delivering the brand guidelines, I got to work designing the website on day 5. The goal was to facilitate the transition from website visitor to church visitor in a way that was easy, smooth, and friendly. With that goal in mind, I set out to create a modern, sleek site that was "cooler" than your average church site.

Web Development

I began developing the website in Webflow on day 7.

I started by mapping out all of the CMS collections (team members, events, sermon recordings, etc), and filling in their data. After developing the home page, I created the dynamic, CMS-powered pages over the next few days.

For this project, micro-interactions were a key component of creating a clean user experience. I spent roughly 2 days on animations.

Finally, I spent the last several days writing Javascript and jQuery to power the more advanced functions of the site. For example, the livestream page needed to show the correct Vimeo livestream event based on time of day. I also implemented a custom filtering system for events.

Staff CMS Training

On day 13, I trained the staff on how to use the CMS. I walked them through the process of adding team members, uploading sermons, creating events, etc. Since that day, they have been fully self-sustaining - I have not had to assist them with anything CMS-related.

The Results

Hard Results (YoY)

• +80% average user engagement time
• +30% organic search traffic
• +40% event registrations
• +70% livestream views

Soft Results

• Consistent uploading of content now that the process has been made much easier