One hundred and forty-two churches on one map

The problem

A regional church union serves three people at once. Someone who has just moved to a village and wants the nearest congregation. Someone who follows the union’s teaching, its news and its video programme. And someone who wants to give. One site has to serve all three without becoming three sites — and it has to be run by people whose job is not websites. Before it, the list of congregations was a spreadsheet.

What I built

The directory is the product

142 congregations, each a record with its address, coordinates and contacts, kept by the union itself. On the directory page they are a map, a list and a search, side by side. Pins group by district and split apart as you zoom; the list shows every congregation with its town; the search is for people who already know the name of the village and do not want to hunt for it on a map.

This is the part that gets used. Everything else on the site is read; the directory is used, by a person standing somewhere unfamiliar on a Saturday evening.

Three kinds of record, three jobs

Congregations, news and the union’s history, each its own record with its own page layout. The video block pulls from the union’s YouTube channel and sits in the first screen with the latest episodes beside it. For this audience video is the main format, so the home page is laid out as a media portal, not as a company front page with a hero photo.

A donation path that does not feel like a checkout

One clear “Donate” in the header of every page, and a page that says where the money goes before it asks for any. Giving here is a relationship, not a transaction, and a hard-sell donation flow reads as wrong to exactly the people most likely to give.

Little to update, little to break

The union has no developer on retainer. So the site is a custom theme with a short list of plugins — the map and the search-engine basics — instead of a page builder and a stack of add-ons, each one an update that can break something at 2am. Every plugin that is not there is a problem the union will never have.

On mobile

The video slider, the news feed and the side blocks stack into one column. Nothing from the sidebar is dropped on the way down — hiding the “useful resources” block on phones is the usual shortcut, and it is the block a person on a phone actually needed.

The map, honestly

At the time of writing, the map tiles carry Google’s “for development purposes only” watermark and a notice that the map cannot load. The map plugin draws its tiles from Google, and Google shows that watermark when the key behind the map has no billing account attached. That account is the union’s, so the fix is theirs to make — a setting in their Google console, not a change to the site — and it should be made before anyone is sent to this page.

Two things are worth knowing meanwhile. The list and the search beside the map still work, so a congregation is still findable by name or town while the map is not: the page keeps answering when the map does not. And the choice of map provider is now the first question I ask on any directory, before a single pin is placed, because Google bills per map load and a page people open every weekend can pass the free allowance.

I am leaving this in on purpose. A portfolio that only shows things in perfect condition has never been responsible for anything after launch.

What the union gets

A congregation that moves, closes or gets a new phone number is one record edited by the union, and the list and the search follow. News and video go up by the people who have them. And nobody has to call a developer to do any of it.