New St. Mark Baptist Church: a website for a church community

A church website has two readers. A member wants this week's service times, the events calendar, the ministries and a way to give. A newcomer wants to know what the church believes, who leads it, what a first visit is like and where to park. Most church sites serve one and lose the other.

The brief for New St. Mark Baptist Church was a site that answers both from the first screen and that the church's own volunteers can keep up to date.

Eleven11 Digital, which delivers Opsian's small-business work in the United States, designed and built the site. The first screen welcomes a newcomer with the service times and a plain invitation; the sections that follow carry the ministries, the events and the leadership, with giving reachable from every page.

The site is built so that a volunteer updates the calendar, posts an announcement or adds a sermon without a developer. That matters more for a church than for most organisations, because the content changes every week and the people who change it are giving their time.

Opsian's work with community and non-profit organisations follows one rule at every scale: the system has to be run by the people who are there. For a church that means a site a volunteer can maintain on a Sunday afternoon.