Anthem Church

I built Anthem's site in 2020. Six years later they asked me to come back and modernize it, which meant a lot to me.

By then the site had grown to 98 pages, written by a lot of different people over those years. Most of them were fine on their own, but you could read four in a row and not be sure it was the same church. The weekly email had gone the same direction, and that one lands in everybody's inbox.

They were on Squarespace and happy there. Moving them off would have solved a problem they did not have and created a real one: a staff who can no longer edit their own site. So the constraint was set going in. Redesign it, leave them on the platform they know.

The newsletter went first. It ships every week, everyone reads it, and it is small enough to get right before committing the same decisions across 98 pages. So the email is where the design got worked out: the type, how much black, how far the yellow goes, what an event card looks like with a photo in it.

I built their team a generator to hold it. They drag sections together in a visual editor, pull from a saved event and image library, see it render live beside them, and copy the HTML out the other side. Merge tags preserved, brand baked in.

By the time we got to the website the design had been through a dozen real sends and the staff had already been using it for weeks.

I crawled all 98 pages first, so we were talking about the site that existed rather than the one we remembered.

Then I wrote a copywriting style guide: voice, sentence length, active voice, present tense for what God is doing now, specific numbers instead of vague ones, and a list of words we do not use. It is opinionated on purpose, because the version I drafted first tried to leave room for everything and was useless to write against.

With that in hand we rewrote about 30 pages, and I redesigned the homepage as Squarespace code injection: site-wide CSS, a numbered code block per section so anyone can apply them in order, and schema markup. Most of those design decisions were already made in the email.

Then I widened the generator to cover the site. The same tool that builds their newsletter now generates the page code for events, groups, sermons and series, speakers, staff, and open positions. Their team fills in the content, copies the block, and pastes it into Squarespace. One set of brand rules produces the email and the pages, so the two stay matched without anybody policing it.

Their team runs it. They write their own pages, generate their own code, and send their own email, and it all sounds and looks like the same church.

The spots that still need a hand edit, like the latest sermon video, are marked in the code with a comment so the person doing it does not have to read the whole file to find the one line that changes.