Joe Leach – 20th October 2022

Hello and welcome to the new Grace Church website and to our brand-new blog page! First thing’s first: all credit goes to a Mr Simon Taylor for building the new website. But importantly and more impressively, all credit to the same man for coming up with the very brilliant title of this blog post!

It’s worth laying out a few principles that have been at play in the design of the new website and also what this blog will be about.

Who is the website for?

Primarily, the website is for people who are new to Grace church or are just looking in. Our goal is that it helps give a flavour of what kind of church we are and helps people to connect with us; and it has been designed and built with this primary focus in mind. That said, we also hope that the layout and content of the site will serve those who are already part of Grace Church. Pages like the ‘Events’ page will help members to keep up with what’s going on and you can even access ChurchSuite from the footer of any page (for exciting stuff like rotas). Ultimately, we hope it should be simple enough for any old Joe Bloggs to navigate and use.

How does the multi-site thing work?

Building a website for a multi-site church is no simple thing. We are one church and we want that to be clear but we also want it to be clear to everyone looking in that we have fully-fledged church congregations in three locations. We have tried to achieve both these things as best we can. Each site has its own dedicated page with all the necessary practical information but beyond that, all the information is shared and applicable to all the sites. I think the website represents us well in every way and as one church that is in three locations.

Less is more

This is a principle we have really tried to keep to throughout the website. You will not be able to find everything you ever needed to know about Grace Church on our website but we felt that keeping things simple and minimal make everything simpler to use and also nicer to look at.

How is this blog not just another ‘Joe Bloggs’?

Yes, I will continue to rinse and stretch that pun of everything it’s worth. In fact, I was very tempted to name the entire blog ‘Joe Blogs’. The reason I did not in the end was not that I didn’t rate the quality of the pun highly enough (as I am sure you can tell) but that whilst I will be the one who writes the majority of the posts, it will not be exclusively me. This is not really my blog as it will have a handful of contributors. We will post about news and updates such as significant events coming up, new missional opportunities, team changes and so on. It’s also the place where we may post profiles and articles about people or ministries in the church.

Get Involved

Ultimately, whoever you are, we hope this website helps you to know how welcome you are at Grace Church and that it can help you to come along and get stuck right in!