The brief
Stuart Townend is one of today’s leading worship songwriters. Hymns such as “In Christ alone”, “How deep the Father’s love” and “The power of the cross” are sung in churches around the world, while the skill and depth of his writing has drawn some to compare his contribution to hymnody to that of Watts and Wesley.
We’d been working with Stuart for a number of years supporting his original website. When the time came to develop a new site, Stuart asked us to help, and we were delighted to step in.
While the old site had a great aesthetic, users were facing some navigational difficulties, and owing to the fixed-width design the site didn’t work well on smartphones. Due to various technical inefficiencies, the site was also performing very slowly, which was an increasing frustration to users. We were tasked with rejuvenating the site with a particular focus on encouraging users to access Stuart’s wealth of songs and resources to equip the modern church.
Our approach
We rebuilt the site from the ground up. A fresh new design refocused visitors on exploring Stuart’s work, while a redeveloped WordPress theme addressed the technical difficulties that were slowing the site down.
We also took the opportunity to move Stuart’s shop over to WooCommerce – the biggest WordPress e-commerce solution – in order to facilitate the growth of this aspect of the site.
The site now features an advanced search and filter feature that helps visitors find songs based on numerous criteria – something that was a particular problem on the original site. Once a visitor is browsing a song, they now have the opportunity to play a preview, a video if available, and moreover, access the full song via their favourite streaming service.