A church website redesign for Ocean Church

Ocean Church meets every Sunday at the Little Theatre in Oysterbay, Dar es Salaam, with four services in English. Its About page describes a community of locals, expats, students and young families from all over the world, and welcomes people who are in Dar for a two-year work contract as well as people who have lived there all their lives.

For someone who has just arrived in the city, the website is where they meet the church before they know anyone who goes. So the website carries a lot of the welcome.

This article looks at what the church’s current website already does well. Then it goes through the full church website redesign I proposed, page by page, and what each change adds for a newcomer. If you lead a church in Tanzania or run its communications, the checklist at the end is for your own website.

Who visits the website on a Saturday

Before any design, I studied the current site page by page, its sermon library, its media library and a year of the church’s Instagram posts.

That visitor asks four questions, in this order:

1. When are the services, and where?
2. Will I fit in here?
3. What happens on a Sunday, and what about my children?
4. Can I hear a sermon before I come?

Members, leaders and partners use the website too, and they have their own pages. But the newcomer has the most questions and no one to ask yet, so their questions set the order of the home page.

What the current website does well

The current site at theoceanindar.org already holds most of what a newcomer needs. Its page title reads “International Church in Dar es Salaam”, a phrase someone new to the city might search for. The home page lists the four Sunday times, and the footer gives the full address at the Little Theatre on Haile Selassie Road.

The Plan your visit page is warm and practical. It says the services last about 90 minutes and are held entirely in English, that people wear anything from jeans to Kitenge or suits, and that there is secure parking inside the compound. It names each children’s class by age, and tells visitors who come by Uber, Bolt or Bajaj to search for “Ocean Church” in the app.

The About page sets out the church’s vision, its mission and six core values, and says Ocean is part of the Tanzania Assemblies of God (TAG). The Give page offers four ways to give, including a mobile money till for Airtel, Halotel, Yas and Vodacom.

How the church website redesign is organised

The redesign has 17 page layouts, each drawn for desktop and phone. They sit in four groups, so the pages a newcomer needs come first:

• Sunday: everything a first visit needs, with Plan your visit, the service times, the address and Next Generation for children and youth.
• Life in the week: connect groups, men’s and women’s ministry, prayer and serving.
• Pages that grow: sermons, series and events. Each new one takes its layout from a ready-made template.
• Seasons: campaigns with a start and an end, such as It’s Time and Summer Camp.

The menu opens to the full screen. It lists every page with a short line about each one, and shows this Sunday’s times beside them, with a Directions button. Plan your visit stays in the header on every page.

The first Sunday, step by step

The home page answers the first question early. Under “Join us this Sunday” come the four services, from 7:30 in the morning to 1:30 in the afternoon, the address and a Plan your visit button.

Behind the pages, the times, the address and the children’s ages are typed once, in one place, and every page shows them from there. If a service time changes, the office changes it in one field and every page shows the new time.

The Plan your visit page then sets out a first Sunday in five steps:

1. Arrive and park, inside the compound or by Uber, Bolt or Bajaj.
2. The welcome team at the door.
3. Checking children in at Ocean Kids, which has rooms for every age from six months to 13.
4. A 90-minute service in English.
5. A next step for people who are new.

Below the steps, the page answers what to wear, how to get there by car or by Uber, Bolt or Bajaj, and a few questions people ask. A Copy the address button sits next to Get directions.

The second question, “Will I fit in here?”, is answered on the home page by “Welcome home”, the first heading on the page. It says who comes to Ocean, from people in Dar on a two-year contract to people who have lived there all their lives. Nine Sunday photographs follow it.

Sermons, giving and ministries

Ocean already has a large library of sermons online. The redesign adds a sermons page with every message, grouped by series and topic, and a search. Where a sermon has a video, it plays at the top of its page, with the written notes underneath.

On the home page, “The latest message” shows the newest sermon with its date, its speaker and a Watch the sermon button, and lists three earlier sermons with their series beside it. A visitor can hear the church’s teaching before they decide to come.

It’s Time is the church’s campaign for a permanent home on the Peninsula. On the It’s Time page, the church explains that it hosts 700 to 800 adults in a space meant for 534 and often turns families away. The plan is to raise USD 5.6M by April 2027 and to reach USD 7M by October 2027.

In the redesign, It’s Time has a section on the home page, “A home for generations”, with the amounts to raise and pictures of the planned building, and a page of its own. Give has its own page as well, and every page links to it from the menu and the footer.

The ministries follow under “Beyond Sunday”: prayer, women’s ministry, men’s ministry and Ocean Kids. Each has one line about what happens and a button that names the action, such as Pray with us.

The church’s own look, kept and refined

The logo, the church’s own font, Aeonik, its words and its photographs all stay. The redesign changes where things sit, so a newcomer finds each answer quickly.

I kept the church’s gold and softened it into an antique gold. A deeper shade is used for gold words on white and a lighter shade for gold words on charcoal, so both are easy to read. Headings such as WELCOME HOME and WHAT WE VALUE use heavy weights of Aeonik. The icons are one set in one thin line weight, so they match the type.

The vision, the six values and their Bible verses stay as the church wrote them. I wrote the copy around them in plain, warm English. The home page uses more than 30 photographs from the church’s own library, so a newcomer can see a real Sunday before they arrive.

Headings rise into place and photographs settle as they come into view. When a phone is set to reduce motion, these movements are turned off. It is built as a custom WordPress theme. Before I shared it, I checked its pages for broken links and missing files.

What to check on your own site

If you run a church website in Tanzania, these are the points I would check first:

• A newcomer can find the service times and the place on the first screen of a phone.
• The times are typed in one place, so one change updates every page.
• One page sets out a first Sunday, from parking to the end of the service.
• Each children’s class has its age range and a place to check in.
• The latest sermon is one tap from the home page, and older ones are grouped by series.
• Campaigns and events leave the menu when they end.
• Every button says what happens next.
• The photos are your own, from real Sundays.

For the same points with examples from churches in the UK, the US and Kenya, read what the best church websites get right. For churches that welcome people new to the city, there is a separate article on reaching English speakers in Dar es Salaam.

The full redesign, with the current site and the redesign side by side, is on the Ocean Church case study. You can also open the redesign itself at church.theascend.net.

Short answers about Ocean Church