Faithful Marketing (or How to Create a Church Website)

How do you brand a body of people? How do you market a symbol? How do you design a great user experience for a constantly changing demographic group? Those are but a few of the many, many worldview-heavy challenges we faced as we created a website for Memorial Presbyterian Church (PCA) in St. Louis.

We spent many hours asking questions, studying cultures and subcultures, collaborating, developing and revising content, and wandering the church grounds and surrounding environs. To borrow the language of the client, we practiced incarnational marketing—in other words, we entered into the world of the client in order to produce a website faithful to their beliefs and values.

Among the many decisions we made, perhaps the most important was to feature the physical church building itself as the cornerstone of the website. To that end, our Associate Creative Director Crystal spent time photographing the gorgeous (and cooperative) subject. Many of those edited photos populate the website, and many of the rest exist in a photo gallery we created for the website. The photos of that building say a lot, and that made my job as writer a lot easier.

We typically brand companies in food, pet, or health industries, but occasionally we have the privilege of applying our marketing expertise to a client outside those areas of focus. When we do that, though many of the specifics are new, we’re still doing what we always do: learning the client and the client’s market so well that we can communicate their brand faithfully. We’re honored to have been entrusted with such a meaningful project, and we’re proud of the result: a rich, well-designed website that faithfully and beautifully articulates the worldview, the history, and the physical symbol of a large body of people.