“Our organization recently contracted with Rystedt Creative to update our website. They did a great job recommending upgrades and handled the work for us. Also, because we are a non-profit, they took into consideration our limited resources for their pricing structure. We really appreciate the quick turnaround time too!”
– Pastor Tom Zucconi, Holy Cross Lutheran Church
Holy Cross Lutheran Church is a congregation in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod located in Dallas Texas. The congregation is currently ministering to both English and Spanish speakers of all ages through their worship services and varied programs. Holy Cross has a WordPress powered website that their staff thought could use some improvements.
We worked closely with Holy Cross’ staff to help them determine what about their website could be improved and what impact they could expect each improvement to have upon their online reach. Holy Cross took advantage of a free consultation call, a free website evaluation, and our free website self-evaluation tool throughout their staff decision making process. (By the way, these free resources are available to you as well. Contact us to receive your free consultation call and website evaluation.) Ultimately, Holy Cross asked us to make numerous improvements to hcdallas.org.
We assisted Holy Cross by…
Replacing their slider plugin
Holy Cross Lutheran Church has a full width slider just below the header of their home page. They use this slider to make various announcements. Their original slider was powered by their WordPress theme. The default slider caused the page to “jump” when slides had different heights. We switched hcdallas.org to Slider Revolution, recreated their current slides using Slider Revolution, and provided them with an introductory walk through of the new slider software.
We have continued to offer support for their staff on how to use Slider Revolution and implement it on their website.
Installing modern widgets
Holy Cross Lutheran Church packs their homepage full of info including their location and Twitter feed. Unfortunately their Google Maps and Twitter widgets were outdated and had limited functionality. Google Maps and Twitter now offer interactive widgets. We replaced the static map and simple Twitter feed on their homepage with these modern widgets and customized the size and colors to match their theme. These widgets allow visitors to open their location in Google Maps, like and share their tweets, follow their Twitter account, and view photos they tweet.
Implementing blog author profiles
hcdallas.org’s theme included simple blog author profiles with the name, photo, and bio of the post’s author. We added the ability to custom build blog author profiles. The new blog author profiles include social and contact links in order to increase trust in the author and social connectivity.
Making minor menu adjustments
We also made minor adjustments to hcdallas.org’s main menu in order to better guide visitor through the site.
Adding robust social sharing features
In addition to the social media links included in their new blog author profiles, we added robust social sharing features such as share buttons tailored for desktop and mobile visitors, a highlight to share feature, and image share buttons. These social sharing features make it easier for visitors to share content than copying and pasting links. Visitors are now able to share hcdallas.org’s content by merely clicking the social media button for where they want to share it or highlighting the text they want to share.
Adding structured metadata
When Holy Cross Lutheran Church contacted us their website did not include any structured metadata. We added structured metadata to their site including a site description, social accounts, contact info, hours, location, and organization type. This metadata is passed to search engines and social networks so that they better understand Holy Cross and display additional info.
Enabling bilingual capabilities
Holy Cross is already building a bilingual community. We want hcdallas.org to minister to this bilingual community even on the Web so we added bilingual support to Holy Cross Lutheran Church’s website and provided them with an introductory walk through of the content they should translate. The bilingual solution we chose detects the language of the device loading the site and automatically sets the language to match (either English or Spanish with English being default). Holy Cross’ team can now add post and page content in both Spanish and English and the website will display the correct language automatically.
We have continued to work with Holy Cross’ staff to help them transition their pages to Spanish.
Generating an XML sitemap
When Holy Cross Lutheran Church contacted us their website did not include an XML sitemap and our analytic tools were overestimating the number of pages on their site. We generated an XML sitemap for hcdallas.org. This sitemap makes it easier for Google to index their website properly.
Designing a modern and organized email template
We also created a new email template for Holy Cross Lutheran Church to use for their email newsletters. Their original template was dated and disorganized. We designed a new template, integrated it with their email service, and wrote an explanation of why we designed the template the way we did. This template gives Holy Cross a fresh email design that they can understand, reuse, and modify.
Looking for a church in Dallas Texas? Be sure to visit Holy Cross Lutheran Church.
Does your website need updating? Your next step is as easy as contacting us for a free initial consultation call.
By the way, we offer non-profits a 10% discount on all our services because we want to help you help others. Contact us to learn more.
