Case study

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
Before & after

The same pages, before and after.

Same church, same words, rebuilt so people can actually use them. Click or tap each image to switch between the old site and the new one.

The homepage

Click image to switch before / after

Same church, same message. One of them tells a first-time visitor what they need to know. A crowded template with a generic title becomes a clear invitation, with service times above the fold and the church's own colours drawn from their logo.

The same page, on a phone

Click image to switch before / after

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 desktop menu was switched off at phone widths with nothing in its place. Now a working menu, tap-to-call, tap-for-directions, and text sized to read without pinching.

What We Believe

Click image to switch before / after

Nineteen articles of faith. Reproduced word for word, then made possible to actually read. One unbroken wall of text becomes articles that open on their own, with all 134 Scripture references expanding 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.

  1. No navigation on a phone. The menu was hidden below 940px, leaving the only links 3,700 pixels down in the footer.
  2. 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.
  3. One page title for the whole site. Every page announced itself identically to search results.
  4. Nothing machine-readable. No structured data, no social preview tags, no canonical tags, no sitemap.
  5. Conflicting contact details. Two different phone numbers and two different email addresses across the site.
  6. Wrong service times published elsewhere. Six directories listed Sunday evening an hour off, one untouched for over six years.
  7. A whole year of events invisible. All 78 of them were locked inside a single flat image.
  8. 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.

MeasureBeforeAfter
Homepage HTML weight63,197 bytes19,863 bytes (68% smaller)
Page titlesIdentical on every pageUnique and descriptive per page
Structured dataNoneChurch, FAQ, 78 events, staff, video
Social preview tagsNoneFull Open Graph and Twitter cards
Mobile navigationNoneWorking menu on every page
Layout methodNested layout tablesSemantic HTML5
JavaScriptjQuery 1.7.1, released 20113 KB of plain JavaScript
Sitemap & canonicalsNeitherBoth, submitted to Google
Who owns itVendor platformThe church
The careful part

Moving twenty years without losing anything.

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

  1. Every old address still works. Ten indexed URLs were mapped to their new pages, so two decades of search history carried across.
  2. Email never went down. Both domains carried live church mailboxes. The website records were repointed and the mail records left untouched.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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Or call or text me at (502) 509-3105