The brief
We’ve worked with the King’s Arms for a number of years, and when it was time to replace the website we developed seven years previously we were commissioned again. Having seen much growth in the intervening time, the Kings Arms team were keen to simplify their content and give greater emphasis on their video content and ways to join their community.
With strong in-house creative capacity, the team wanted increased flexibility to create new pages, layouts and landing pages to support the various initiates they commit to over time.
The platform was to be switched from Joomla (a CMS used for the past 15 years by King’s Arms) to WordPress in order to offer easier management of content and access to a better ecosystem of functionality add-ons. The custom theme was to server as a starting point for other King’s Arms micosites as and when they are needed in the future.
Our approach
We worked closely with the King’s Arms in-house creative team who led the creative direction for the project to produce a highly functional WordPress website focussed on mobile and media. The final site offers the following features:
- Mobile-first user experience
- Fully searchable media library with automatic publishing to Apple Podcasts via XML
- Advanced calendar and event managements with variable event views
- Templated management of various structured content
- Fully customised presentation of data via the ChurchSuite API
- A WordPress theme foundation for future Kings Arms microsites
- Event publishing into the ‘Subsplash’ app used by King’s Arms
Highly structured with the flexibility to adapt
With each of the main sections of the site templated, almost anyone can update the content on a daily basis without the risk of the page layouts being altered or broken. For example, adding a talk in both audio and video formats is only a few minutes work. Once tagged, the assets are easily searchable, automatically promoted on the landing page and fed to other platforms automatically.
On the other end of the spectrum, the King’s Arms creative team have the use of a fully-featured drag-and-drop visual page builder which affords them the flexibility to create highly effective landing pages for events or initiates that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to commission custom development work for.
Integrated with other platforms
The new site makes sharing content between platforms effortless. For example, King’s Arms use the popular ‘ChurchSuite ‘ to manage various front and back-office functions. We have integrated their ‘small groups’ signup functionality seamless into the website. We pull the group status, images, signup information and links via the ChurchSuite API onto the website and add advanced filtering functionality to help make the large number of groups more accessible to the user.
We aggregate all talks added to the website to Apple Podcasts via an XML feed so users can subscribe to receive new content as soon as it’s published.
All events added to the Kings Arms calendar are pushed to a dedicated page on the King’s Arms Subsplash app available in the Android and Apple app stores. Content is also kept in sync and links seamlessly to the website when the user needs further details.