Outreach Rebuild
Most church website redesigns do not fail on design. They stall on process: content nobody wrote, decisions nobody owned, and a finish line nobody defined. Here is the path we walk churches through, laid out so you can run it with anyone, including without us.
Step 1: Write down why, in one sentence
"Our site embarrasses us" is a feeling, not a target. "A first-time family can find times, directions, and kids info in under a minute on a phone" is a target. Every decision later gets easier when the sentence exists. Pick yours before you pick colors.
Step 2: Audit what you have, honestly
Walk your current site as a stranger on a phone and list what is wrong in three columns: outdated (fixable content), missing (pages that should exist; compare against a complete checklist), and broken (forms, links, mobile layout). This list becomes your scope, and it stops the project from growing a new wing every meeting. If you want outside eyes, this is exactly what our free recorded audit does.
Step 3: Decide renovate versus rebuild
The test is not how the site looks. It is: can a normal person at your church update it next Tuesday? If yes, and the bones are sound, renovate. If updates require summoning the one person who remembers the password to a builder nobody understands, a clean rebuild is usually cheaper than archaeology.
Step 4: Gather content before design starts
This is the step that saves weekends. Collect, in one folder: confirmed service times, address and parking notes, ministry list with a sentence each, staff names, titles, and photos, your statement of beliefs, giving details, and a batch of real photos. Our guide on what to write on every page exists precisely for this step. A designer with content builds in weeks; a designer waiting on content builds in seasons.
Step 5: Appoint one approver
Hear everyone once at the start: survey the congregation, ask the elders, collect the wish list. Then close the polls and hand final say to one trusted person. Committee-reviewed revisions are where church web projects go to die, not because anyone is wrong, but because seven mild preferences cannot all be honored. One approver, empowered by the pastor, is the single biggest predictor of finishing.
Step 6: Approve the homepage before anything else
Whoever builds your site, insist on this order: homepage first, approval, then the rest. The homepage sets the design language for every other page. Changing direction on one page costs a revision; changing direction on twenty costs a relationship. (This is a hard rule in our own process for exactly that reason.)
Step 7: Define "done," then launch imperfect
Done means: checklist pages exist, content is current, forms tested, phone-friendly, and the two or three unconfirmed details are honestly marked "coming soon" rather than guessed. Done does not mean perfect. A launched site that is 95 percent right serves guests today; a perfect site in progress serves no one. Ship, then polish.
Step 8: Decide the care plan before launch day
Here is the uncomfortable truth: the average redesign looks great for about six months, then begins the slow slide that made you redesign in the first place. Before launch, answer in writing: who updates it, on what rhythm, and what happens when that person is busy, tired, or gone. If the answer is a shrug, that is the real problem to solve, and it is solvable; we wrote about why sites go stale and the options, ours included, without pretending a plan like Outreach Rebuild's is the only valid one.
