New Brand Vision is delighted to announce the launch of the new Churches Conservation Trust website!

The Loyd Grossman headed trust is the national charity for protecting historic churches at risk, representing more than 340 churches across the UK and attracting 1.5 million visitors each year.

New Brand Vision was tasked to create a content-heavy site, with taxonomised content to relate news, reviews, local attractions, projects and imagery to each church in the network.

The site also had to handle a high level payment integration functionality, extensive image galleries and customised video views, as well as Flickr integration to tap into the online community which already exists for photography of churches.

After extensive consultations in order to define the architecture, New Brand Vision prepared a functional specification and worked closely with the designers to create a user friendly, highly accessible and SEO-friendly site. Built around Decibel, our core CMS product - which is being prepared for independent commercial launch later this year - a number of bespoke features were developed in order to offer CCT full flexibility and control over their content.

Tim, Technical Diector at New Brand Vision, emphasised the sophistication of the taxonomy involved in the CCT website and the importance of this discipline to the project at large:

“The Churches Conservation website offers a very good example of a taxonomy driven website which requires very little maintenance on the part of the client but offers an engaging, interactive experience to its users,” said de Paris. “

Interestingly the site is already attracting a comparatively high volume of user comment postings, a number of which specifically refer to the site’s ease of use and engaging navigation process, such as Stephen Dawson, who recently remarked, “This is my favourite church of all time. Wonderful brilliant new website.”

Another fantastic feature that New Brand Vision has helped to build into the site is the specialised Google Maps functionality.

The CCT church icon has been plotted across the Google map framework, with the ability to zoom in on churches in specific areas of the country and find additional nearby attractions and places of historical interest to plan into your visit. Zooming in further will take you right to the doorstep of the church, giving you a preliminary look at the architecture and ambience you can expect to enjoy when you arrive at your destination.  

All in all this has been a fantastic success on behalf of the Churches Conservation Trust and from the initial user comments coming through it also looks to have been something of a triumph on behalf of its visitors as well!