Website Development for Parkside Church

The Challenge

Parkside Church is a complex organization, with many diverse ministries serving people in the Cleveland area.

Their website was correspondingly complex.

In their attempts to serve everyone from employees to attendees, Parkside Church leadership had layered content onto their site in a way that had become cumbersome and overwhelming over the years. And the site’s visual design was inconsistent with their offline presence.

Parkside Church had already gotten to know Agathon as a cloud hosting and development support customer of ours. They trusted us. When it was time to refresh their website, they reached out to us first.

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The Process

Parkside Church knew their website needed streamlining to better serve the needs of each of their users. Our job was to help them recognize and empathize with these needs.

We collaborated with the Parkside Church team to build 5 proto-personas that served as sample website users. Then, together we mapped out each persona’s journey through the site. Using this new perspective, the team went through a card-sorting exercise to reorganize the website’s existing content to fit each persona’s needs.

Image showing one of the personas created during the Parkside Church onsite discovery meeting.
Image showing the information architecture of the site created during the Parkside Church onsite discover meeting
Image showing another persona created during the Parkside Church onsite discovery meeting.
Image showing the user journey map created during the Parkside Church onsite discovery meeting
Image created during the Parkside Church onsite discovery meeting showing the user's mobile experience

This user-centered approach lead to two key insights.

Pks 1

In looking at their website through the lens of their users, the Parkside Church team found new patterns in their existing content. This allowed them to reorganize everything from seven main navigation items down to four: Visit, Learn, Connect, and Serve.

This approach addressed a particular barrier for new attendees, who had struggled with what to expect on their first visit.

The existing website content was valuable, but needed to be reorganized to serve its users.

Pks 2

Parkside Church’s website redesign needed to pivot to be mobile first, as the site’s mobile traffic was on the rise. It also needed a more functional events and ministry calendar that allowed users to browse events by week and month, or specific ministry.

Users needed new site functionality to connect with the content they wanted in an efficient and effective way.

How It Worked

Because Parkside Church understood the importance of empathizing with their users while redesigning their website, the end product serves everyone more effectively.

The new Parkside Church website provides users with the following:

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Parkside Church is best positioned to understand whom they serve. We merely helped them apply what they do so well offline to their digital presence. Our dedicated approach to building trust, by focusing on the user’s best interest, helped Parkside Church feel confident about making these significant and necessary changes.

With a focus on trust and effective collaboration, we worked together to build a website that serves all of Parkside Church’s stakeholders simply and effectively.

Are you looking for a website that better serves your users? We’d love to help.

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