A Modern Website for 700 Years of Church Heritage

St Peter’s Church in Grandborough is a Grade II* listed medieval church with more than 700 years of history. Alongside its role as an active parish church, the building is also an important part of the village’s heritage.

The brief was to replace an ageing website with something that could serve both purposes: a practical, welcoming website for church life today and a permanent digital resource for the history, restoration and stories connected with St Peter’s.

The existing website had been built from scratch by a parishioner who, well beyond retirement age, had taught herself HTML so that St Peter’s could have a presence online. That deserves enormous credit! It had served the church well for many years.

But the web moves quickly. Over time, the site had become increasingly difficult to maintain, its structure and presentation were showing their age, and it did not work properly across modern mobile devices.

The new website therefore needed to do more than simply modernise the design.

• It needed be a easy-to-update go-to resource for the local community.
• Whilst also supporting the church’s National Lottery Heritage Fund-backed restoration work, presenting the history and Heritage Funded restoration of the building in a way that was accessible to visitors, local residents and anyone researching the church from further afield.

I reorganised the website around two complementary roles: St Peter’s as a living parish church and St Peter’s as a place of local heritage.

Day-to-day information such as services, events, news, and church life is given a clear, straightforward structure, while the Heritage Hub provides a much deeper route into the building’s history.

The heritage content includes an interactive church tour, restoration information, archive material and individual stories connected with the church and village, including the War Memorial and biographies of those who fell. QR codes can also direct visitors inside the church to relevant online information, allowing the physical building and website to work together.

St Peter’s now has a super modern website that feels appropriate for a historic church without looking old-fashioned or institutional.

Visitors can quickly find practical information about services, events and parish life, while those interested in the building itself can explore a much richer digital heritage resource.

Behind the scenes, the Webflow CMS gives the church team a more manageable way to keep changing information up to date, whilst continuing to expand the heritage archive over time.

The result is a website designed not simply as an online noticeboard, but as a lasting digital record of St Peter’s, its community and more than seven centuries of local history.