Local Spring Selected work Church on Gladstone
Case study · Church · Toronto, Ontario
A website from 2011, rebuilt so the church could be found and answered
sebc.ca ran on Apple iWeb — software discontinued in 2011 — as two parallel sets of hand-edited pages on a fixed 701-pixel canvas, with no contact form anywhere on it. I rebuilt it bilingual on a platform the church's own staff run, wired the enquiries into the messenger they actually read, and gave them event registration they can open themselves.
01 Results
What the rebuild changed
- ×3
- Visits to the site the church's own figure, after the rebuild
- 2
- Languages on one site Russian and English, kept in step
- ~200
- Places per event sign-up retreat registration the staff open themselves
- 0
- Developers needed to update it the team edits the site without me
Growing traffic was never the brief — being understood was. The visit figure is the church's own; everything else on this page can be checked against the live site and the Internet Archive's captures of the old one. 1
The project
- Client
- Church on Gladstone — Slavic Evangelical Baptist Church
- Where
- 95 Gladstone Ave, Toronto, Ontario
- Congregation
- Russian- and English-speaking, services in both
- Before
- An Apple iWeb site, hand-maintained since about 2011
- Build
- Modern low-code platform, run by the church's own staff
- Engagement
- Redesign, migration, systems, training and handover
- Live site
- sebc.ca
What I did
- Full redesign Structure, layout and visual language
- Platform migration Off software discontinued in 2011
- Two languages Russian and English, one structure
- Forms to a messenger Enquiries land where the team already looks
- Leads into a CRM Recorded, not just seen and lost
- Event registration CRM and a spreadsheet the organisers already use
- Google Business Profile Cleaned up and tied to the site
- Local search Findable by what people actually type
- Logo refresh Redrawn to work on screens and in print
- Projector slides Service screens in the same visual language
- YouTube channel Created, configured and branded
- Social channels Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram, linked from every page
- Training and handover The church's own staff run the site, the channels and the sign-ups
02 The brief
What was actually wrong
A church website has one job: let somebody who is thinking about walking in on Sunday find out when, where, in what language, and who they would be talking to. The old site could not do any of that quickly, and there was no way to ask.
-
Problem
The homepage was a notice from 2020
In the Internet Archive's last capture of the old site, in August 2022, sebc.ca still opened with the pastor's message about provincial reopening rules, linking a City of Toronto PDF from June 2020. The service time was a line inside that message.
Solution
A homepage that leads with who the church is, when it meets and where — in both languages, before anyone scrolls.
-
Problem
There was no way to write to the church
Not one form existed anywhere on the site. The contacts page offered phone numbers and mailto: links, one of them pointing at a pastor's personal inbox.ru address.
Solution
A form on both language versions that arrives in the team's messenger in seconds and is recorded in a CRM, so nothing depends on one person seeing one email.
-
Problem
The page was built 701 pixels wide
The old site was made in Apple iWeb 3.0.2 — software Apple discontinued in 2011 — and told every browser, phones included, that the page was a fixed 701-pixel canvas. It also asked Internet Explorer to pretend it was IE7.
Solution
One responsive layout that reflows for a phone, which is how most people arrive at a church website in the first place.
-
Problem
Two languages meant two sets of hand-edited pages
HOME.html and GLAVNAA.html, MINISTRIES.html and SLUZENIA.html, CONTACTS.html and KONTAKTY.html. Every change had to be made twice, in an editor that no longer runs on a current Mac.
Solution
One site with two language versions that share a structure — and staff who can edit either one without touching a file.
None of this was neglect. Somebody in the congregation built that site by hand and kept it going for over a decade, in two languages, on a tool that stopped being sold before most of the people reading it owned a smartphone. The problem was never effort — it was that the effort had nowhere left to go.
03 What changed
What changed, screen by screen
Each pair below is the same job on the old site and the new one. Select any screenshot to open it full size.
01Homepage
A stale announcement became an invitation
The old front page asked a visitor to read three paragraphs before learning that the service is at 11. The new one puts the church, the service and the way in front of them immediately, in the language they chose.
02Ministries
A bullet list became something you can picture
Nine ministries were nine lines of capitals with no explanation of any of them. They are now cards with a photograph and a sentence saying who each one is for and when it meets.
03Contact
Phone numbers became a message that gets answered
Reaching the church used to mean calling during the day or emailing a personal address and hoping. Now a message from either language version arrives in the team's messenger and is logged, so someone answers it whether or not one particular person is at their desk.
Other screens, before and after
-
Before — the Russian page
-
After — the Russian version
-
After — when and where
-
After — the leaders
The same homepage on a phone
-
Before · on a phone
-
After · on a phone
04 Enquiries
Where a message actually goes
A form is only worth having if somebody sees it. The old site had none; the risk with adding one is that it quietly fills an inbox nobody opens. So the form was not the deliverable — the path behind it was.
- Seconds
It arrives in a messenger, not an inbox
Every submission is pushed straight into the team's Telegram. Nobody has to remember to check a webmail account that only ever holds spam and one real message a month.
- Recorded
And it is written down at the same time
The same enquiry lands in a CRM. A message that arrives while somebody is preaching is still there on Monday, with who sent it and what they asked.
- Either language
One pipeline for both versions
Russian and English forms feed the same destination, so there is no second process to remember and no enquiry that quietly goes to the version nobody is watching.
- Answerable
The reply starts with context
The form asks for enough to reply properly and no more. A church enquiry is usually a person deciding whether to walk in on Sunday — that deserves an answer the same day, not a form-letter.
Every page also carries the church's own channels — WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube in the header, Telegram alongside them on the Russian side. Somebody who would rather message than fill in a form has a way to do that too, and it lands in the same place.
05 Events
Retreat registration, run by the church
A retreat is a headcount problem before it is anything else: beds to make up, meals to cook, cars to fill, payments to reconcile. It used to be done on paper and in phone calls. Now there is a page for it.
What the form asks
Name, which church you are coming from, whether you are staying overnight or visiting for the day, how many adults and how many children, a phone number, and whether you need a lift. That is the whole list — and it is exactly what the organisers need to count beds, order food and arrange transport.
Registrations go into the CRM and onto a Google Sheet the organisers already work in, so the person doing the catering and the person doing the beds are reading the same numbers. It is comfortable up to roughly two hundred people, which is the size of the church's own retreats. 2
The page is a pattern, not a favour. The 2024 fall retreat page exists in both languages at sebc.ca/fall_retreat_en, and the staff can copy it for the next event, change the dates and questions, and open registration without asking anyone.
06 Beyond the site
The parts that were not the website
A church is not only found online, and it is not only seen online. Half of this engagement was the work around the site.
- Identity
The logo, redrawn
The old mark was a piece of 2000s word art that fell apart at any size. It was redrawn to hold up on a phone screen, on a projector and in print.
- In the room
Projector slides that match the site
Service screens — announcements, verses, song titles — designed in the same visual language, so what the congregation sees on Sunday and what a visitor sees online are recognisably the same church.
- Video
A YouTube channel, set up properly
Created, configured and branded, so sermons have somewhere permanent to live and the site can point at them.
- Findable
The Google profile and the channels people search
The Google Business Profile cleaned up and tied to the site, and Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram linked from every page — so someone who searches the church by name finds the hours, the address and a way to ask a question in the same breath.
07 Handover
The church runs its own website now
The old site failed slowly because it depended on one person and one piece of software. Replacing it with a site that depends on one agency would have been the same mistake in a nicer typeface.
- Trained
The staff were taught the tool, not just handed it
Sitting with the people who would actually make the changes, on the pages they would actually change, until editing the site was an ordinary Tuesday task rather than a favour to ask.
- No developer
Nothing routine needs me
Service times, announcements, a new leader, a new event page — the team does all of it. I am not in the loop for anything a church changes month to month.
- Their accounts
The church owns every piece of it
The domain, the platform, the channels and the profile are the church's own. Nothing about the site is held in an account they cannot reach.
- Repeatable
The next event page is theirs to make
The retreat page is a pattern, not a one-off. The staff can copy it, change the dates and the questions, and open registration for the next event without asking anyone.
The measure of this project is how rarely I hear from them. The site has been edited, extended and kept current by the church's own people since handover — which is the only version of "low-maintenance" that means anything.
Sitting on a site nobody on your team can change?
If your website is held together by one person, one old tool, or one agency invoice per sentence, tell me what you have now and I will reply with a practical first read on what it would take to get it back under your own control.
Notes
- Where the “before” screenshots come from. The old site was replaced at the migration, so it no longer exists on the church's server. Every “before” shot on this page is the Internet Archive's capture of sebc.ca, taken in 2022 and rendered in the same browser as the “after” shots. That also means no page-speed comparison is offered here: an archived page is served by the archive, not by the church's host, so timing the two against each other would prove nothing. The details quoted about the old build — iWeb 3.0.2, the 701-pixel canvas, the IE7 setting, the absence of any form — come from the archived source itself. The pastors' personal numbers on the archived contacts page are blurred here; the church's own published line is left readable, because it is the point of the screenshot. ↩
- What “about two hundred” means. It is the practical ceiling for running an event this way — one registration page feeding a CRM and a shared sheet, with people rather than software doing the reconciling. It is not a hard limit in the tooling; it is the point past which an event needs ticketing rather than a sign-up sheet. The church's own retreats sit comfortably inside it. ↩