Four years of "welcome to our new church," on one page that never changed.
Hope Baptist Church in Warsaw, Indiana had a website with one visible page: a short greeting, a menu, and nothing a visitor could act on. The Internet Archive captured it in April 2021, January 2023, and June 2025, and all three captures are the same 4,990-byte page, still greeting readers with "Welcome to the website for our new church!" four years on. In May 2026 the church went live on a site built by hand around the people it actually serves: first-time visitors deciding whether to come on Sunday.
- Client
- Hope Baptist Church
- Where
- Warsaw, Indiana
- Scope
- Design, build, hosting, ongoing care
- Live at
- hopebaptistwarsaw.org
The same address, before and after.
The before images are the old site exactly as the Internet Archive preserved it in June 2025. Click or tap each image to switch.
The homepage
Click image to switch before / after
The old page led with a sunset and a slogan, and stopped there: no service times, no address, nothing to tap. The new one answers a first-time visitor's questions above the fold, with times and directions in the first screen.
The same page, on a phone
Click image to switch before / after
On a phone the old banner cropped its own headline mid-word and the logo ran off the edge of the screen. The rebuilt page was designed for the phone first: everything fits, and service times, address, and buttons are in the first screen.
What We Believe
Click image to switch before / after
The old page, as the archive preserved it in 2021, rendered its heading inside a wood-grain graphic. The new page sets every article as real text, with a jump menu across the top and each Scripture reference as a tappable chip.
The site a visitor found before.
Every claim below comes from the Internet Archive's captures of the old site, not from memory. The captures span April 2021 to June 2025.
- One page, byte for byte, for four years. All three archived captures are the identical 4,990-byte homepage: the same title, the same greeting, the same single image.
- A welcome that aged in place. "Welcome to the website for our new church!" was still the page's message in the June 2025 capture, four years after it first appeared.
- Nothing for search engines to work with. No meta description, no structured data, no social preview tags. A search result or a shared link had only the bare title "Hope Baptist Church Warsaw" to show.
- No way to watch or listen. The archived menu had no sermons link and nothing to watch online, at a time when that is the first thing many people look for.
- Built in a desktop app. The site was generated by RapidWeaver, a Mac site builder. Every change depended on the one computer and the one person with the project file.
Before and after, side by side.
The before column is measured from the archive's captures. The after column is measured from the live site today.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Pages | One visible page | Eight: gospel, beliefs, sermons, ministries, church, visit |
| Watching a service | No link anywhere on the page | Live stream plus a video library, and the page switches automatically when the church is live |
| Search description | None | Written per page, in the church's own words |
| Structured data | None | Church schema, so Google and AI assistants can answer questions about service times and location |
| Social preview | Bare title only | Full Open Graph tags, so a shared link shows the church properly |
| Sitemap | Not present in the captures | All eight pages, submitted to Google |
| Platform | RapidWeaver desktop builder | Hand-built static HTML, no builder, nothing to patch |
| Upkeep | Unchanged across four years of captures | Hosted and cared for month to month |
What the new site does.
A church website has one job above the rest: help someone decide to walk in the door on Sunday. Every page works toward that.
- Plan Your First Visit answers the real questions. Where to park, what to expect, when to arrive: the things people are too polite to call and ask.
- The sermons page knows when church is live. A small service checks whether the live stream is on and switches the page automatically, so Sunday visitors are never staring at last week's video.
- Doctrine reproduced exactly. What the church believes is published in the church's own words. Nothing summarized, nothing softened.
- Ministries have room to grow. The Scripture ministry and the women's ministry each have a page of their own, with more planned as they launch.
- Tap-to-call, tap-for-directions. Phone number and address are live links on every page, sized for thumbs.
Is your church's site stuck in time?
If your website still announces something that stopped being news years ago, that is worth twenty minutes of conversation.
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