Twenty years on one platform, and a phone you couldn't navigate.

Calvary Road Baptist Church in New Albany, Indiana had been on the same church-website platform since 2006. The content was good. Everything around it was working against them. We rebuilt the site from the ground up, moved it onto a domain and hosting account the church owns outright, and carried their search history across.

Client: Calvary Road Baptist Church
Where: New Albany, Indiana
Scope: Rebuild, migration, local SEO
Live at: crbcindiana.com

No mobile menu On a phone, the old site's navigation was hidden with no replacement. The only links sat roughly 3,700 pixels down, in the footer.

1 title tag Every page shared the identical page title, so no page could rank for anything specific.

78 events The whole year's calendar existed only as a flat picture. Search engines and screen readers saw nothing.

Before & after

The homepage.

Same church, same message. One of them tells a first-time visitor what they need to know.

The previous Calvary Road Baptist Church homepage on a desktop browser — A crowded template with a generic title, no social preview, and no way for Google to understand what the page was.

The rebuilt Calvary Road Baptist Church homepage on a desktop browser — A clear invitation, service times above the fold, and the church's own colours drawn from their logo.

Before & after

The same homepage, on a phone.

This is the one that mattered most. Around half of the people looking for a church are doing it on a phone, and the old site gave them nothing to tap.

The previous homepage on a phone, with no visible navigation menu — The desktop menu was simply switched off at phone widths and nothing took its place. No hamburger, no links, no way through the site.

The rebuilt homepage on a phone, with a working menu button — A working menu, tap-to-call, tap-for-directions, and text sized to read without pinching.

Before & after

What We Believe.

Nineteen articles of faith. Reproduced word for word, then made possible to actually read.

The previous statement of faith page, one long unbroken wall of text — One unbroken wall of text, with Scripture references as plain unclickable strings.

The rebuilt statement of faith page with expandable articles — Each article opens on its own, and all 134 Scripture references expand the exact King James verse inline.

What was broken

Eight things worth fixing.

The platform was built on table layouts and a 2011 version of jQuery, which left no way to fix any of this. Some problems were visible. The ones costing them most were not.

No navigation on a phone. The menu was hidden below 940px with nothing replacing it.
The homepage wasn't a stable address. A temporary redirect sent the root URL into a chain of ASP pages, so Google indexed a secondary URL.
One page title for the whole site. Every page announced itself identically to search results.
Nothing machine-readable. No structured data, no social preview tags, no canonical tags, no sitemap.
Conflicting contact details. Two different phone numbers and two different email addresses across the site.
Wrong service times published elsewhere. Six directories listed Sunday evening an hour off, one untouched for over six years.
A whole year of events invisible. The activities calendar was a single flat image.
Duplicated analytics and a boxed-in logo. Two tracking scripts loading at once, and a logo saved as a black-background JPEG.

Measured

Before and after, side by side.

Every figure below was measured directly from the two live sites, not estimated.

Measure	Before	After
Homepage HTML weight	63,197 bytes	19,863 bytes (68% smaller)
Page titles	Identical on every page	Unique and descriptive per page
Structured data	None	Church, FAQ, 78 events, staff, video
Social preview tags	None	Full Open Graph and Twitter cards
Mobile navigation	None	Working menu on every page
Layout method	Nested layout tables	Semantic HTML5
JavaScript	jQuery 1.7.1, released 2011	3 KB of plain JavaScript
Sitemap & canonicals	Neither	Both, submitted to Google
Who owns it	Vendor platform	The church

The careful part

Moving twenty years without losing anything.

A rebuild is the easy half. The half that goes wrong is the move.

Every old address still works. Ten indexed URLs were mapped to their new pages, so two decades of search history carried across.
Email never went down. Both domains carried live church mailboxes. The website records were repointed and the mail records left untouched.
A hidden redirect was found and removed. The new domain still had an old forwarding rule quietly sending a share of visitors back to the previous site.
The church owns the keys. Domain, hosting, and the code all sit in accounts belonging to the church, with me added to maintain them.

Where it stands. The site is live at crbcindiana.com over HTTPS, with all eight pages indexed, the full year of events published in a form Google can read, and a printable calendar the office can hand out. The church can point anyone at it without a caveat.

Is your site working against you?

If it looks fine on your laptop and falls apart on a phone, that is worth twenty minutes of conversation.

Schedule a consultation →