Under the Hood of the 2 Pillars Church Website
Several months ago I posted about the new 2 Pillars Church website redesign and promised a future post explaining some of the backend details. It’s about time I made good on that promise…
CMS
While we were previously with a company that specializes in building websites for churches, our new site was built using Squarespace. It’s relevant to note here that we didn’t make the move to Squarespace because we were unhappy with this company. Rather, we chose Squarespace because of its significant upside—something I’ll be writing about in an upcoming post.
Theme & Design
Squarespace has a number of great, high quality themes that would have sufficed for the 2 Pillars site. They look modern and professional and don’t have a generic, canned feel. Further, customization is easy and doesn’t require that you have mad coding skills.
That said, we pulled together an impressive team of four volunteers—one local entrepreneur and three web developers who call 2 Pillars Church home—who were able and willing to build a custom Squarespace site from the ground up. I provided direction for the site’s design and layout and they made it happen.
Fonts
2 Pillars is a church plant, so free is good. For this reason, we turned to Google Fonts for help with our website typography needs. You’ll find Montserrat for titles and headers and Open Sans everywhere else.
One day when 2 Pillars is rolling in cash, we’ll consider paying for premium fonts. Until then, Google Fonts it is!
Blog and Podcast
The 2 Pillars blog and sermon audio podcast are hosted by Squarespace. The feeds are both run through FeedPress which provides tracking analytics for feeds and podcasts. I elected not to use Feedburner, the more common choice for feed management, due to its shaky and uncertain future. If I can avoid going through the process of migrating feeds in the future, I will.
I’ve been very pleased with FeedPress so far. The product is solid and their customer service has been top notch. On one occasion I was having problems with the feed for this blog and they patiently helped me to diagnose the issue. A few days and countless messages later, we discovered that my web host was actually the source of the problem, not FeedPress.
Anything Else?
Well, that’s a quick, high-level look under the hood of the 2 Pillars website. If you have questions about any of the above or if I’ve left anything out, feel free to post in the comments.