Organizing Ministries on the Web

Providing Parkside Church with web mini-sites

The best part about being involved in a church is just that: being involved. Bible studies, support groups, Vacation Bible School, music ministry: there is something for almost everyone. With so many different ministry options, it can be hard to decide what to be involved with.

Christian churches like Parkside Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, always manage to keep schedules and events coordinated across their ministries at their physical location. But this can be an even greater challenge on the web, where information constantly changes and updates needed for the website can often come at the last minute.

So as part of the redesign strategy for their website, Pastor of Communications and Connections Matt McAlvey and Communications Manager Jenn Nenadov wanted a flexible way for their 32 life-stages ministries and support groups to maintain their own content on the website. So Five Q developed "mini-sites".

Creating Controlled Chaos

The mini-site structural goal was simple: develop a pre-determined number of website content pages for each ministry to maintain. Each ministry would need:

A main "landing" page with a quick-glance ministry overview
A "news" blog to talk about the latest ministry news
An "events" section to promote upcoming activities, allow for online event registration, and archive past events
A "calendar" for a monthly view of ministry-specific events that would also filter into the church-wide website calendar
A "media" section for audio and video taken during meetings or events
A "volunteer" sign-up for those interested in getting involved
A "contact form" where people can submit questions about the ministry

Additionally, the mini-site administration system was developed to be flexible enough for ministry staff to "turn on/off" features on the pages or to rearrange them in the display without affecting the pages of another ministry through various levels of website permissions. This would give each ministry the freedom to update their portion of the website without burdening other web administrators. Furthermore, designated web administrators could create entirely new mini-sites for new ministries easily within the website tools, with the ability to disable them as needed.

From a design perspective, the overall layouts of the mini-site pages remained the same across the entire website. This ensures consistency and prevents the ministries from introducing design elements to their individual pages that might not be in keeping with Parkside Church's brand.

Finally, if new features were developed for overall website use, these could be easily deployed to the mini-sites if they wanted to use these features as well. Our programming team was able to control the features offered while providing the flexibility that Parkside Church would need as its ministries continued to thrive and grow.

Don't Anticipate... Participate

Since launching the mini-site feature for the website, traffic to the ministry pages has increased 75% for pageviews and 21% for time spent on those pages. Traffic for the support group pages has jumped an astounding 157% for pageviews and almost 17% for time spent on those pages. For those ministries that update their content on a regular basis, there a significant increase in web traffic to those pages as well.

Best of all, the ministries within Parkside Church are now empowered to move their online communications forward to reach out to current and new audiences, and we are grateful to have been a part of that continued progress.