Some websites are just brochures. Others carry the weight of a mission. When Mt. Gilead Bible Camp + Conference Center came to us, we knew right away this was the second kind.
Tucked into 238 acres of Northern California redwoods near Sebastopol, Mt. Gilead has been a Christian camp and conference center since 1963. Summer camps for kids through high schoolers, year-round retreats for churches and ministries, and community events that bring families back season after season. A ministry with that much history deserves a website that works as hard as its people do.
Here’s what the project involved — and why the choices behind it matter.
The Foundation: Moving From Wix to WordPress
The single most consequential decision in this project wasn’t a color or a font. It was the platform.
Mt. Gilead’s previous site was built on Wix. Wix is approachable, but it comes with real limits — less control over the finer points of search-engine optimization, and less flexibility as an organization grows and its needs get more specific.
We migrated the site to WordPress, which powers a large share of the web for good reason. It gives an organization far more control over how each page is structured, how content is managed day to day, and how search engines read the site. For a ministry that publishes events, camps, and retreat information year-round, that flexibility isn’t a luxury — it’s the difference between a site that keeps up and one that holds you back.
A migration like this has to be handled carefully. Content, media, and page structure all have to move over intact, and the switch itself — repointing the domain from the old host to the new one — has to be timed so visitors and email keep working without interruption. We coordinated that cutover with Mt. Gilead’s team so the transition to the live WordPress site was clean.
The new design features a bolder colors, a “warm” comfortable interface and disciplined styles and structure across the site. Technical upgrades filled in critical SEO gaps with fully optimized titles, meta descriptions and schema scripting that give each page the best chance to be seen by Google bots
A Design That Honors The Place
The redwoods do something to people. There’s a quiet up there that’s hard to put into words. We wanted the site to carry a little of that feeling.
The new design keeps Mt. Gilead firmly on-brand — the greens, the logo, the sense of place — while modernizing the experience. A short video greets visitors on the home page. Programs, retreats, events, and employment are all a click or two away. And because most people will visit from a phone, every page was built to look and work well on any screen.
The goal throughout was simple: someone new to Mt. Gilead should understand what it is and what it offers within a few seconds of arriving, and someone who already loves the place should feel right at home.
Built To Be Found
A beautiful website that no one can find doesn’t help anyone. So a big part of this project happened under the hood.
Every page on the new site was given a clear, purposeful title and description — the text that helps both search engines and prospective visitors understand what a page is about. We also added structured data (schema) across the site, which is a behind-the-scenes way of describing each page’s content in a language search engines understand well.
We brought the same thinking to the words on the page. Headlines were written to answer a visitor’s first question quickly while naturally including the terms real people search for — “retreat center Sonoma County,” “Christian camp in the redwoods,” and the like. Warmth and searchability aren’t in conflict when the copy is written with both in mind.
The Result
Mt. Gilead’s new website is live now at mtgilead.org. It’s faster to navigate, easier to use on any device, and built on a foundation that gives the ministry room to grow for years to come — all while staying true to the identity Mt. Gilead has carried since 1963.
We’re grateful we got to be part of it.
The Affordable Web Guy builds and maintains WordPress websites, managed hosting, and local SEO for organizations that need their site to do real work. If yours has outgrown its current setup, let’s talk.
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