HighDesertChurch.com Prompts Engagement with Christ

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High Desert’s Mission

To prepare individuals to engage their relational world, their oikos (the Greek word for “household”), with the news of God’s grace. Ekklesia 360 experts helped strategize a website that continues this mission online.

“We tried to build the website as a good first impression as a church for visitors and as a tool that people use to invite their world to. We know church can be an intimidating idea or scary place. We want to remove that barrier and want to see people come to know Christ.” -Communications Director Aaron Ullah

High Desert Church Screenshot

Campus-Specific First Impressions

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Challenge 1: Outdated Navigation

Communications Director Aaron Ullah knew the High Desert website was outdated and challenging to navigate. “Some key content that people were looking for on our site was missing, like a first impressions page. Part of that was because we didn’t have the tools or features to do it well on our website,” he explains.

Solution: Clear Campus Options

High Desert started with an Ekklesia 360 Strategy Project to plan the site. With careful planning, they launched a mobile-responsive design that guides first time visitors from the homepage to learn about the four campus options. The site provides campus-specific visitor pages that clearly communicate service times, what to expect, ministries for children, youth, adults, small groups, and serving opportunities. They also introduce the campus staff members visitors will meet.

Apple Valley Campus

FYI: Ekklesia 360 Ministry Focused Layouts are pre-designed page templates churches can use to build robust landing pages to convert visitors to regular attenders. Here are some examples of High Desert’s campus pages:

Result: High Desert’s new site saw a 41% increase of views of the “I’m New” and “Campus Detail” pages.

Challenge 2: Multi-site Localization

Ullah says that the High Desert website needed to convey that although they are a four-campus multi-site church with some consistent teaching and events across locations, each campus also identifies with its specific community. “Localization comes into play where each campus church gets to make decisions based on the community around the church,” Ullah explains. The new High Desert website had to show how each campus unifies with the city or town in which it is based.

Solution: Set Your Campus

Ekklesia 360 built a “Set as My Campus” feature which allows a user to select a home campus which then updates all campus filters. The events calendar will then show campus-specific events tagged for the campus selected. The “Set Your Home Campus” feature is so important for our model because there’s that local expression at each campus. Setting your home campus gives a user everything that they need to know about the campus they currently attend, or are looking to visit,” says Ullah.

Q&A with Aaron

What do you love about your role as Communications Director?

“One of the things I love about my job is having the privilege to work at a church and to do things for God’s kingdom. I love the role that my team and I play in ministry by partnering with every single staff member at our church to help them be successful in everything they do. We may not be on the frontlines of ministry because we are a support team, but we help the people who are.”

How has Ekklesia 360 helped you and your team do your job better?

“E360 has been tremendously helpful. It’s allowed us to have features that are already built out and that we don’t have to worry about having the infrastructure to build out ourselves, or have a team dedicated to that. Adding new pages and templates to the website is super easy and seamless. Ekklesia 360 has even helped us with connecting the website and The Rock.”

What made you decide to partner with Ekklesia 360?

“Honestly, it was an easy decision for me to go with e360. There were two big deciding factors: features and the support that comes with e360.

The Strategy Project was tremendously helpful for me and was unlike anything I had seen with any other company that we researched. Not only were the strategic plans helpful, but you guys had the right template and features to execute the strategy.

The support team is the best! They have been priceless to me. I’ve probably been a regular user of the support team. They are awesome and super helpful with any tweaks that we need. I feel like they’ve gotten to know me very well. Even in crunch time they come through. I appreciate that.”

What was the process and timeline like?

“Honestly, it was a great process. When we first talked with e360 I let you guys know that I wanted to launch our new site within six months. You guys didn’t say, ‘Oh, you’re crazy!’ You guys said, ‘Okay, let’s figure this out!’ That was really appreciated.”