Case study · The flagship
CityLine Church.
A 600-attendance church in Chicagoland on SnapPages — templated, slow, and quietly leaking giving to the bundled platform's spread. We rebuilt it bespoke from scratch, wired it to Planning Center, and shipped the Sunday Engine live by week seven. This is the project the studio was productized from.
By the numbers
What changed when we rebuilt it.
-
< 1s
How fast the homepage loads on a phone
-
100
Mobile PageSpeed score (out of 100)
-
413
Pages on the live site — sermons, study guides, posts
-
$0
Of CityLine's giving lost to a platform's cut
Before & after
Same congregation.
A site that finally sounds like them.
[ BEFORE ]
The SnapPages site
- SnapPages template, the same one dozens of churches use
- Lighthouse mobile in the 40s
- No sermon transcription, no real search
- Manual weekly study-guide PDF: Word → Canva → PDF → upload → Bitly → PCO
- Live video stuck inside YouTube's copyright system
- Giving on a bundled processor with a quiet platform fee
[ AFTER ]
The studio rebuild
- Bespoke build, designed page by page in CityLine's voice
- PageSpeed 100 mobile, < 1s loads on a real Sunday
- Every sermon transcribed, topic-tagged, AI-searchable
- One Dropbox drop → branded curriculum PDF + small-group notes, auto-published
- Own live stream, copyright-safe, with a live service companion page
- Giving on Planning Center. Zero platform cut. Audited end to end.
The shoot
We spent a Sunday
with the church.
Worship. Kids check-in. The pastor preaching. Families lingering in the lobby. Real light, real faces, real building. The shoot is what made the site stop looking like a stock-photo brochure and start looking like CityLine.
We delivered 320 edited photos. The church owns every one. They're licensed for anything they'd ever want to do — newsletters, prints, Instagram, future microsites.
Inside the build
What's running,
in plain English.
You don't need to care what software we used. You should care that it's fast, that it doesn't break, that your team can edit it, and that it stays cheap to run. Here's what powers CityLine, in pastor-friendly terms.
For the curious: it's a modern, lean architecture using widely-trusted, security-vetted tools. We're happy to nerd out about it on a call. For everyone else: it just works.
- where it lives fast hosting, no servers to maintain
- how content is updated any volunteer can edit, two clicks
- sermons & events live from Planning Center
- sermon archive every sermon transcribed and searchable
- the live stream owned by the church · copyright-safe
- Sunday Engine running every week, on schedule
- found by AI search ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity friendly
- monthly cost to run all of this ~$34
$ all systems healthy · last check 14 seconds ago