Personal Website Project for Port Campbell Baptist Church

By Kimberly Peterson on September 18, 2024

I've been thinking about building a simple website for our church, just to have a more prominent internet presence, for a while now. Last week, the thought wouldn't leave me alone! So last weekend I started a Squarespace website project and pretty much built the framework and initial pages in just a few hours. Throughout the next few days after that of compiling content and images, and populating the event calendar etc.. and then voila! I secured a domain name, connected it, and paid for the Squarespace Business subscription plan to access all the features I think we would need. It felt easy because I had full creative freedom over it, and was able to make most of the decisions in terms of what pages should be included etc.. also, the church never really asked for it haha I just went ahead and did it because I wanted to, and I still had make sure our leadership team was OK with it and had them review it etc. After a few minor tweaks and agreement on what should and should not be shared etc.. the website was ready to go live. It was one of the quickest turnarounds ever, but bearing in mind, this was a very simple and information driven website without any complicated features and bells and whistles on the backend. Squarespace has truly made building a website like this so easy, with the power to handle more if needed.

View Website: www.portcampbellbaptistchurch.org

Some details of my process, to help those thinking of building their own website:

Photos were a mix of free stock images (Squarespace gives you access to some free images, alternatively I also use pexels.com and Canva) and recent personal shots
The Event Calendar feature was a nice touch for an overall view of all upcoming church services (and details on the topic and speaker that day etc) and prayer meetings and Youth Group nights etc.
Newsletter subscription
Contact forms
A tourism page to reach visitors to Port Campbell
Use of ChatGPT to help come up with blurbs and refine messaging
Use of Canva for photo editing and flyer designs
Connect to Google Search Console under "Analytics" to have access to commonly searched Google keywords.
Future plan: Upload a series of sermon recordings and other resources such as blog posts, devotions, articles etc. The sermon recordings will be hosted on YouTube and embedded onto the website.
Future plan: Try the Squarespace Email tool to send out future newsletters.