MRM Project Feature: Lorie Newman Brand & Website Design

Lorie Newman is a speaker and teacher with a powerful testimony and a passion for “rising up” on behalf of our families. Through tremendous personal loss, Lorie learned to advocate and fight through true spiritual warfare and now provides opportunities for others to do the same through her newly-founded nonprofit Anointed Life Christian Equipping.

Neither Lorie nor her ministry had an online presence prior to this year, and a mutual friend directed her our way. We were able to create a beautiful and functional online space for Anointed Life, provide a professional brand package for the ministry, and establish a donor suite and eStore to help meet the financial needs for the nonprofit.

About This Recent Project

Sitemap Planning and Organization

One of the perks of a brand new website is the blank slate we get to start with. For most clients, this feels overwhelming—not knowing where to begin to put words on a page or think through the site flow and information—so we make good use of a few content framework templates for key pages of the website to guide the content development. In Lorie’s case, Mandy created a suggested sitemap for her, and then worked alongside Lorie to think through the overall layout and flow of the site, creating pathways for potential donors and event attendees so they can easily find pertinent information and get involved with Anointed Life.

We repurposed marketing and pitch content Lorie had already used to build awareness of the ministry to create necessary calls to action throughout the page copy and prompted her to help “fill in the blanks” so the pages would be complete, informative, and actionable.

See live site here

Brand Design

Someone had gifted Lorie with a basic logo design for Anointed Life Christian Equipping, but she did not have a full brand kit, style guide, or print-ready logo variations to use in any of her promotions for the nonprofit or the print-on-demand products the ministry planned to sell to generate revenue. Our designer Carol worked her magic to replicate the logo Lorie provided to us and to create on-brand, use-case variations of it. She then assembled a style or brand guide for the ministry so all publications and promotions would be professional and consistent.

“Mama Bear Warfare” has become a bit of a mantra or nickname for Lorie’s teachings and intensives. As a project add-on, Lorie requested that we also provide an additional mini brand kit design for this phrase so it could be used on print-on-demand products and ministry merchandise. Karen was able to mimic the Anointed Life Christian Equipping brand design from Carol to create a complementary design for “Mama Bear Warfare”, perfectly combining the ministry’s brand and providing a powerful visual for Lorie’s teachings.

Website Design and Development

Once all of the website content was outlined and populated, the documents were passed on to Carol to begin creating the pretty page layouts or mockups for Lorie’s review. Through our discovery process and initial discussions, Lorie provided great input for her desired color palette, font styles, and even the preferred detail of the arched images. All of this detailed direction guided the design work and helped us move through the page mockups fairly quickly. Carol incorporated the soft colors and rounded edges throughout, creating the perfect visual balance between the heavier topics and content and the hope Lorie offers to her event attendees.

Because the nonprofit relies heavily on donations and partner support, it was important to develop a simple way for Anointed Life to accept and track this support. We installed the full GiveWP suite, which provides easy to use donation forms, the option for recurring gifts, and a dashboard for donors to view and download their giving history. GiveWP also integrates well with WooCommerce, the eStore solution we installed on the new website, making it easy for customers in the online store to send a donation with their purchase as well.

Mandy worked to create a custom storefront for the Anointed Life and Mama Bear Warfare merchandise, connecting the eStore to Printful for the print-on-demand products and setting up a few simple downloadable products too. Though this new storefront offers a variety of products, the setup of the store intentionally minimizes Lorie’s need to manage inventory or fulfill any orders directly, which is necessary for a busy speaker and ministry leader like her!

Another project addition was a simple landing page for Lorie as a speaker and author. Mandy replicated some of the design details from Carol’s mockups to create the single page Lorie can use as she begins to build her own platform separate from the nonprofit. With a prospective publishing contract in motion, this was a great way to quickly establish an online hub for her without creating the additional expense of a separate website.

The final stage of this project’s scope involved performing our SEO Jumpstart to fully optimize the key pages of the website, set up Google Analytics and the Search Console, and submit the new sitemap to search engines. Wrapping up our site work, we added a Privacy Policy, a cookie notice to the website to help with compliance for current privacy laws, and an accessibility widget to ensure all users have a great experience navigating the new site.

Lorie Newman and Anointed Life Christian Equipping now have a beautiful online space that will serve them well and foster great ministry and platform growth. It was our pleasure to be a small part of that!

What Lorie had to say…

“I am so in love with the site! This is all so wonderful! I’ve read through all the information provided will be continuing to ‘teach myself’ by watching the videos, etc. It’s A LOT! But I’m thankful you all are just an email away. 🙂 I’m so pleased!”