“Josh Starr has amazing technical ability, an eye for design, and is marketing savvy. He flat out knows what he’s doing. Josh and I have worked on a number of projects together and he always delivers. I highly recommend him.”
– Brian Howard, CEO of Acts 29
Acts 29
Acts 29 is a diverse, global community of now 684 churches in nearly 50 countries. They are characterized by theological clarity, cultural engagement, and missional innovation. Acts 29 believes church planting is the best way to make disciples of all nations, they are committed to planting healthy, multiplying churches.
Acts 29 has a global staff of more than 50 people, helping plant churches all across the Globe. Because of this global nature, Acts 29 asked me to help create a website that would help communicate clearly the mission and also aid in growing their global support.
“Josh is an excellently skilled web developer; professional at every level, easy to work with, helpful at every turn of a project, and very knowledgeable. Josh’s expertise allows you to trust him to complete any web project with the highest level of detail, ensuring that your website is not only beautiful but functions well for your business. Working with Josh made our website project not only simply tolerable but actually quite enjoyable! ”
– Rachel Wolverton, Director of Marketing & Communications at Acts 29
The Challenge
Acts 29 has a global user base, and had multiple challenges for a successful website. It needed to load fast, communicate well in multiple languages, facilitate new church planters, grow the donor base, and also look great while doing all that.
The previous website was already built in WordPress, which is a great choice for a content heavy website like Acts29.com. WordPress allows the easy management of posting content, as well as translating the website into multiple languages.
Being a global network, each page and post needed to be translated in 8 languages. WordPress as a platform really excels at this, and once the theme was made and the pages created, we can easily go into each page and auto translate, or manually translate them.
My Solution
I created a custom website for Acts29.com that focused on beautiful design, but also on readability, speed, and growing the organization. With such a large organization and the website already being in WordPress, I spent a lot of time trimming the pages down from the old site, as well as curating the structure of the whole site. After about 5 years of being in a CMS it’s always a good idea to do a solid Content Inventory.
The website has around 100,000 monthly visitors, so the main goal was for it to look great across all devices in all countries. So I focused heavily on how the content will read for posts and pages, and after about three months of development the website was ready to go live.
The Results
Since the website launch, the traffic for Acts29.com has nearly tripled. This is due to a solid content strategy, optimizing for SEO, a fast load time, and beautiful readability. The main goal for the website redesign was to increase the circumference of the top of the funnel for new donors and churches, so a fast and great looking website helps facilitate that goal quite well.
275
Increased Visitors
173
Increased Speed
129
Increased Read Time