St James the Great

The brief

St James the Great in Old Milverton has stood for nine hundred years. Its website was a forty-page GoDaddy builder site, served over plain HTTP, where the things people came for (when is the service, can we marry here, who do we contact) were buried under decades of accumulated pages. The brief was not to add anything. It was to find what the parish actually needed to say and rebuild around that.

What we did

• Rebuilt from scratch in Next.js, replacing a forty-page GoDaddy builder site
• Restructured forty pages into seven clear sections, keeping the content that earned its place and retiring what did not
• Service times given proper prominence: a service every Sunday at 10.30am, answered before anyone has to look for it
• Weddings, baptisms and funerals grouped into one place, because that is how people arrive looking for them
• The nine hundred years of history given a home of its own rather than being spread across the site
• Moved onto HTTPS, having previously been served over plain HTTP
• Safeguarding given clear, findable prominence rather than being buried
• Built to be maintained by the parish, so notices and events stay current without technical help

The numbers

What we said no to

• Carrying everything across. A rebuild that keeps all forty pages is a redecoration, not a fix.
• A generic church template. The building is nine hundred years old and the site should look like it belongs to it.
• Anything the churchwardens could not maintain themselves.

Common questions

• How do you rebuild a church website that has grown to forty pages?

  By deciding what the parish actually needs to say rather than migrating everything. St James went from forty pages to seven sections. The test for each page was whether a real visitor was looking for it, and most of the removed pages had not been read in years.

• What should a parish church website put first?

  Service times. It is the single most common reason anyone visits a church website, and on the old site it was several clicks deep. On the new one it is answered before you have to look: a service every Sunday at 10.30am.

• Can a church keep its own website up to date?

  It should be able to, and this one was built for it. Notices and events are editable by the parish, because a church website that needs a developer for every update is a church website that goes stale by Easter.

• Does a small parish church need a custom website?

  It needs one that works, is secure and can be maintained. The old site was on plain HTTP with no certificate, which browsers now flag to visitors. Fixing that alone matters more than any design consideration.

Stack

• Next.js (App Router)
• React
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• Vercel