Sovereign Grace Music Website
We created a powerful free tool for pastors, worship leaders, and church members to help them get to the right resources more quickly.
The Client
Sovereign Grace Music (SGM) exists to produce Christ-exalting songs and training for the Church from our local churches.
The Challenge
Several years ago, SGM revamped their website to better serve their users. However, it wasn’t meeting their needs. They needed a website that allows users to find tools quickly and easily.
The User
Imagine a worship leader who arrives early on Sunday morning to prepare for the meeting. He has a lot to do to stay on track. Upon arrival, he realizes the chord sheets haven’t been printed. He visits sovereigngracemusic.com on his phone and searches for the songs he needs. He knows they’re there, but they don’t appear until the second or third search page. Then he has to navigate through several pages just to find a download button for the chord sheet.
This is exactly who we built this site for.
We prioritized powerful search functionality and song pages that present users with what they need most, right away.
Beyond that, this site serves as a comprehensive resource for listening to music, accessing training materials, registering for conferences, reviewing talks from previous events, and more.
This project took several months. We started with a discovery phase: what are we doing now that we want to continue? What should we stop? What should we add? Next, we worked through a few design iterations, and of course, the build. We had a few unique pieces to build, which took some extra effort, but we were really pleased with where we ended up. I worked with James Hammack on this project. He project managed and led the development efforts. I researched, designed, and helped with the site build.
To create a more effective search, we weighted the results to the most commonly searched songs, albums, and other resources. And we included a sidebar filter that was as minimal as possible but powerful enough to breeze through several categories.
On song pages, we put download buttons for the most common key signatures at the top. We labeled the buttons with the key signatures so the user only had to see one thing in order to make a decision. Below are two columns: lyrics and copyright information on the left, references, categories, and song information on the right. Beneath, we include every album the song is featured on, music videos, and chord charts for every other language it’s available in.
We focused on mobile-first user experience. We kept content-heavy pages minimal, with a goal in mind to keep users from being overwhelmed by that content.
We focused on mobile-first user experience. We kept content-heavy pages minimal, with a goal in mind to keep users from being overwhelmed by that content.
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Multiple other clients have reached out because they loved this site. And I’ve had the privilege of hearing from users who didn’t know I worked on the site tell me how huge the improvement was.