Church Websites

With more than 25 years of church website strategy and development experience, Big Heart Creative has developed a premium offering for churches seeking to expand their presence online.

Custom Website Design & Hosting

Church website template Your church has a wealth of options when it comes to website development tools and support. Knowing that churches have a unique set of needs and are often supported by a team of volunteers, Big Heart has crafted a package built on our years of experience and knowledge. Services include:

Our team will work with you to create a custom website design.
Premier hosting and maintenance that allows you and your staff to focus on content, not code or development.
Top-tier website security that includes: two-factor authentication, real-time updates of malicious IP address blocklist, country-specific blocking, real-time malware variant detection, and daily backups of your website.
Exciting tools that allow you to manage your church’s needs and grow as those needs change including custom calendars, a form builder, drop and drag page builder, limitless content building tools, and much more.
A growing library of how-to type videos that empower you and your ministry team.
Our highest level of customer support.

Custom Church Designs

Big Heart Creative’s founder, Matt Carlisle, led the team that launched the first United Methodist church website in 1995. Since that time, Matt has developed numerous denominational websites and consulted with hundreds of churches, faith-based organizations, and non-profits. Taking that knowledge, Matt and the Big Heart team will work with you to create a custom design for your church website.

Content Management System

Big Heart Creative websites are developed on WordPress. WordPress is the world’s largest and most popular content management platform. WordPress started as a blogging system in 2003 and has evolved to be the leader in web platforms. 455 million websites globally are supported by WordPress – that’s over 30% of all websites. Big Heart recommends WordPress for its easy-to-use page builder, multi-level user-management, and built-in search engine optimization. WordPress is limited only by your imagination.

Web Features

Page Builder

This package offers a bevy of page building tools including the latest drop and drag page building features. Content managers can build multiple blocks of content organized in columns and rows as desired by simply clicking and dragging. Easily add forms, calendars, and any other feature rich content to your pages as you wish.

Responsive

All Big Heart Creative custom church designs are fully responsive for mobile devices. Your website will scale to whatever platform it is viewed - desktop, mobile device, or tablet.

Forms

Build and publish forms in just minutes. No drudgery, just quick and easy form-building. Select your fields, configure your options, and easily embed forms in your website. Form submissions are delivered to you and your ministry team via email as you designate.

Calendars

Our calendar builder offers just as many custom features. You can choose to display a calendar grid view, which shows the current month in traditional calendar format, or a simple list view. You can create stand-alone pages for each event, integrate Google maps into your event pages, and easily embed a calendar into any page or sidebar of your website. You can also set an event to be recurring.

Newsletter Subscription Integration

Most Big Heart Creative clients have historically used Mailchimp or Constant Contact to support their electronic newsletters. Your new website newsletter subscription form integrates easily with your Mailchimp or Constant Contact account list/s.

"Big Heart Creative redesigned our annual conference website and we couldn’t be more pleased. Matt really listened during our focus group sessions and developed a design which offered both navigation that made sense and a look that expressed who we are. The process of organizing and adding content to a website framework is never easy but the knowledge and experience Big Heart Creative brought to the project made it very doable. We highly recommend Big Heart Creative for any communications project."

Alli Newsom | Communications Director, New Mexico Conference Conference

Hosting & Maintenance

Big Heart Creative provides website maintenance and hosting services on a yearly basis. This yearly subscription includes ongoing web hosting services and quarterly WordPress and plugin updates. As part of this package, you can expect the following:

Guaranteed response time of 24 hours to maintenance requests
Web font hosting (open-source fonts only)
Source code repository with revisions stored
Monitoring of the uptime of your website
Staging site made available to you for testing purposes
Content Delivery Network (CDN) will serve static content on your site (images, CSS, Javascript), allowing your website to load much more quickly
Daily and thorough backups of your website so that it may be fully restored in case of loss
Website migration (only available for websites that are currently running on WordPress).
Monitoring your website functionality to ensure that everything is working as it should. Quarterly software updates may be necessary to address security or stability issues in the software or to add new features. These may include:
- Server-level updates (Linux, PHP, Apache, and various sub-modules)
- Application-level updates to WordPress. WordPress core platform security updates will be applied within 24 hours of release. Major WordPress version releases will be applied within 2 weeks.
- Plugin-level updates for specific functionality within the context of the CMS
- Front-end updates to HTML, CSS, and Javascript
- Assisting with downtime or performance issues by liaising with the web host provider

Please note that Big Heart Creative church designs are only available with the Big Heart Creative hosting and maintenance subscription.

Customer Service

Big Heart Creative has crafted a package that supports what we believe is important to you and your congregation. This offer provides our highest level of customer support. If your website ever experiences a problem, and we don’t notify you first, you will have direct access to Big Heart Creative for immediate assistance. Meeting a client’s goals and needs is our number one priority.

Security

Websites throughout the globe are being attacked by malicious malware and various exploits at all times. The need to beef up security is an ongoing requirement of our commitment to you. We offer you a wealth of added security:

Two-Factor Authentication
Real-time updates of malicious IP address blocklist
Country-specific blocking
Real-time malware variant detection
And much more

Instructional Videos

Your website package includes access to a library of instructional videos. These brief videos detail how to manage and populate your website. Big Heart Creative will continue to build upon the library of how-to type videos that will support you and your ministry team.

A few of our amazing clients ...