Case Study: Mobile Church Website

MSIA is a church and spiritual organization based in Los Angeles, CA, USA. For over a decade, their website at www.msia.org served well both as a powerful fundraising tool, and in providing information and other services to their congregation. In 2009, they decided a full rebuild of the web site was in order. Being aware of the rapid growth in Internet smartphones, Web manager Deborah Martinez decided the new website must be mobile friendly.

“I'm the manager of all web offerings and websites for a non profit spiritual organization. We were building an entirely new website and upgrading our web offerings and wanted to include a mobile version of our new website to keep up with the advancements in mobile technology and appeal to mobile users.

“We are appealing to the younger generation who enjoys the use of mobile for web browsing, and we're keeping up with technology, advances and changes, and planning for the future as well.”

The new MSIA website features a rich and modern design, integrating social media, audio and video. By virtue of this richness, the new web site as designed would be nearly unusable on even high-end smartphones. Mobile Web Up was engaged to find a solution before the new website's public launch.

Poor Mobile Optimization

• Extremely Long Loading Times (over 60 seconds)
• Complex navigation menus fail to work on most mobile phones, preventing visitors from accessing pages
• Broken functionality - unresponsive video boxes and other interactive features
• Over-rich design rapidly drains mobile phone batteries, driving visitors away

Mobile Optimized View: m.msia.org

An extra challenge with this project was related to timing: building an outstanding mobile site while the full version was still being created and refined by a separate team, yet ensuring the mobile site would launch on schedule.

How did it go? To quote MSIA Web manager Deborah Martinez:

“How was the process of working with Mobile Web Up overall? Fantastic! What impressed me was the personal responsibility [our Mobile Web Up rep] took in working with our site, his follow through, that he kept on top of what needed to get done, all of the details, and that he was accountable for getting it done, and he was entirely friendly and easy to work with throughout the project.”

She went on to add:

“Mobile Web Up kept on top of the site development, let us know when they needed any information or design approvals, and completed the site in time for our launch.”

“They also explained technical things in a way that my staff could understand, which is a very valuable ability in the IT world.

“Mobile does appear to be the wave of the future, and the earlier you get on the wave the easier in the long run.

“I highly recommend Mobile Web Up, without reservation!”

Deborah Martinez
Manager of Web Offerings
MSIA

Thanks for the kind words, Deborah!

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