Run personally, by one person

Why this exists

I'm Jake Wells. I build websites for a living — mainly for local businesses through JW Business Websites, and for community groups through JW Community Websites. Churches kept coming up alongside both: a parish wanting the kind of straightforward site a local business would get, or a benefice needing something a community group's website almost fitted, but not quite. Churches needed their own approach, built around how a church actually runs.

The pattern I kept seeing was the same one, again and again. A church would get a nice-looking site, it would go live, and within a year it would be quietly out of date — last Christmas's service times still showing, a "latest news" section with nothing in it since spring. Not because anyone didn't care, but because keeping a website updated takes time nobody spare-handed has. JW Church Websites exists to remove that problem, not just build another site that eventually suffers the same fate.

How it works, day to day

Every site is hand-built rather than assembled from a page-builder or template. That means there's no admin panel, no plugins to keep updated, and nothing that can be hacked or broken by mistake. The trade-off is that you can't log in and edit it yourself, and that's deliberate: you send me what you want on the site — a notice, a story, an event, a photo — and I build the page and publish it on a weekly round. It's genuinely me doing the work.

Part of the wider JW family

JW Church Websites sits alongside JW Business Websites, which builds and looks after sites for local businesses, and JW Community Websites, which does the same for clubs, societies and community groups. All three run on the same principle: a hand-built site, one point of contact, and updates handled personally.

Based in Lincolnshire

I'm based in the Boston area of Lincolnshire. Most of the churches, groups and benefices I've built for so far are local to the county, from a single coastal parish to a nine-church group in the Wolds. Everything's handled remotely, by phone, email or a call, so distance isn't a barrier if you're further afield.