First Baptist Danville | Church Website

First Baptist Church in Danville, IL has a proud history, dating back nearly 200 years. Since 2011, Pastor Paul Rebert has lead the church from being a traditional Independent Fundamental Baptist Church, to a church that combines the best of today’s tradition with the history Baptist tradition. One of the last pieces of the puzzle was a modern website for the church.

Project Needs & Deliverables

The goal was to have a website that was fast to update, always up to date, and is able to survive the next handful of years. Specifically, here’s what was needed and what was built specifically for the church’s new website:

Auto Updating Sermon Player:

In order to keep the sermons (past sermons and services) always up to date, we connected YouTube directly to the website so that anytime the church’s livestream ends, it is automatically added to the website, resulting in never having an out-of-date media section of the church’s website.

Church Livestream On Website:

Although we didn’t connect the church’s livestream to automatically show the livestream when the church goes live on YouTube, we created a plug-and-play way for the church’s secretary to copy and paste the upcoming event’s YouTube URL and paste it into the website so that church members can watch the livestream natively on the website.

Online Bulletin and Service Media Available:

We created a global options section of the section that includes a spot to paste the YouTube link for the livestream and also attach a PDF of the printed bulletin and the link to the service media (what is put on the screen) for easy access.

Events & Announcements:

Although I have solutions to connect Breeze Church Management Software and the website, First Baptist Danville didn’t want to pay the monthly/yearly fee of using a third-party software. Instead, we created a custom events portal that showcase all the events on the Calendar page, allows them to put in a sign up form on the event, but also have the event appear in any order on the home page of the website.

Connection with Church Management Software, Breeze ChMS:

Even though we didn’t use a third-party software for the events, we did utilize their church management software to power all contact forms on the website. That way, any time someone contacts the church, plans a visit, requests prayer, etc., it’s all added into their process flow and queues inside of the software so that no one falls through the cracks and no one is left behind.

Specific Design Elements:

The difference between a custom website and a template website is how much say a church gets in the design of their website. First Baptist Danville and I worked together on exactly how the website would look. Pastor Rebert and the team had a handful of ideas that they wanted to see and a handful of requests – all that probably wouldn’t be possible if they had to pick a template. That’s the beauty of getting a “custom website” for your church – you get a website that is FOR your church, not a website that just talks about your church.