Salem Covenant WordPress Website Remodel

I had the privilege of redesigning / developing the website of Salem Covenant Church, located in Worcester, MA. The best part of the job was re-connecting with longtime friend and colleague, Mark Nilson, who recently was installed at pastor at Salem. Sandy Nelson was in charge of all design related activities, and so, right from the start, we had a good idea that this remodel was going to be special. Sandy and Mark had worked previously on design projects and the results had been excellent, and I believe this new project at Salem turned out wonderfully as well.

The existing site was already in WordPress, so that simplified matters to some extent, but the existing build and organizational structure needed a lot of cleanup. We chose a premium WordPress theme from Kadence, and then set about implementing the great visuals that Sandy was creating. After several rounds of creative design comps, Sandy and Mark settled on making a set of icons that would be used throughout the site as ways of identifying various aspects of the church’s life and ministries. Those icons became a strong part of the new ‘branding’ of the organization, and are also being used in their newsletters and other ephemera, such as letterhead and business cards.

One overarching goal of the site remodel was to bring the new ministry team at Salem up to speed on using WordPress, and being able to add and manage their own content. In order to make this happen, I set up a series of calls with the team in Worcester, where we’d log into WordPress at the same time, and we’d all create new blog posts together. It didn’t take Mark and his team long to begin to manage their own content. Now they post regularly to the site and it looks great!