Holy Trinity Sloane Square
Holy Trinity is a Grade I listed Arts and Crafts church in Chelsea, with serious music and a famous east window. We rebuilt its website and brand from the ground up.
The church was built between 1888 and 1890 by John Dando Sedding and finished by Henry Wilson. Its east window, designed by Burne-Jones and made by Morris and Co., is said to be the largest the firm ever made. Almost none of that came across on the old website, which had become hard to update and looked like it could belong to any church.
The Rector had set out four aims for the church: more people attending in person, stronger finances, deeper engagement with the faith, and better evidence of the church's impact. The new site had to help with all four.
The office also needed to update service times, news and events themselves, without waiting for outside help.
A design drawn from the building
Photography of the church itself does the heritage work, and everything around it is kept modern and calm. Headings are set in Doves Type, cut in 1900 a few years after the church was built. The colours come from the building: the limewashed plaster, the lead of the windows, Wilson's gilded ironwork, and the crimson of the church's own orders of service.
Five sections, in a visitor's words
Worship, Music and Events, The Building, Community and Support. Service times, what to expect on a first visit, life events and giving are each within two taps of arriving. Old addresses forward to the new pages, so nothing anyone saved hits a dead end.
Every page rewritten and checked
The copy was rewritten in the church's own voice and every claim checked against the parish records. Around thirty statements that could not be sourced were taken out.
The East Window feature
The window holds forty-eight figures and from the pews you cannot read a single face. We built it a page of its own, where every figure can be zoomed into, named and read about, with a guided tour through the window. Josh filmed the glass by drone from inside the nave.
A site the office runs
News, events, page copy, the East Window texts and the parish newsletter are all edited by the office in plain screens, and changes are live in seconds. The homepage leads with the next event when there is one and falls back to standing content when there is not.
Looked after
We host it, keep it secure and updated, and make the small changes. The whole thing is documented in a brand book so the reasoning is written down for whoever comes next.
The site is finished and in the parish's hands. The office updates it week by week without waiting on anyone, and the accessibility audit scores one hundred.
The rebuild took about ten weeks, in five phases. At each phase the church saw the real site running and signed it off before we went on.