New Hope Church

Objective: A welcoming front door for a church family

New Hope Church is a Bible-focused, non-denominational church on Saginaw Highway in East Lansing, with Sunday services in person and online. It runs ministries for every age, from children through college students, young professionals, and seniors, along with small groups, care and prayer ministries, missions, and a weekly podcast.

The church had years of recorded messages and a busy calendar, and visitors arrive with simple questions: when are services, what is New Hope like, and where can I watch last Sunday’s message? New Hope needed a site that felt warm to a first-time visitor and gave its own staff an easy way to keep messages and events current.

What Web Ascender Did

We kicked off in July 2024 and launched in April 2025.

• Planning with the church’s team - goal-setting meetings, a new sitemap, and wireframes reviewed and revised together over several rounds
• Design - homepage and inner page concepts refined with feedback from New Hope’s staff
• A WordPress build - themed in the Breakdance page builder, so staff can edit pages without a developer
• Messages and events - custom content types for sermon messages and events, so every message and event is posted the same way
• A message archive - more than 900 past messages imported and organized into 80+ series, browsable by series and speaker, with site search and filtering
• Watch and listen - a video template for each message, audio playback, and a podcast feed for the church’s “Off the Platform” podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts
• Pages for every step - New Here, What We Believe, ministries for every age, small groups, serving, care and prayer requests, missions, giving, and a live stream page
• Launch and training - redirects from the old site, email delivery for forms, mobile testing, a go-live checklist, and training for the staff

Since Launch

We host the site and help with updates as the church year moves along: new events and ministry pages, resource downloads, staff and elder listings, message player fixes, and the podcast connections to Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The Outcome

New Hope Church has a website that welcomes a first-time visitor and keeps the regulars connected. The latest message is always on the homepage, the full archive is a search away, and the staff post messages and events themselves each week.