Along with launching four new churches new today, we’re also unveiling a brand new marshill.com. We’re always trying to find better ways to tell people about Jesus, and we’ve worked really hard to make marshill.com a more useful tool to tell people about Jesus more effectively.

So what’s new?

Blog

We’ve dropped the blog.marshill.com site and moved the latest blog posts straight to the homepage. Searching for things will be a lot easier now that the blog and media content has been put together. If you’re reading this through a feed, double check to make sure you’re subscribed to the latest feed http://feeds.marshill.com/marshill/blog.

Mobile

This is the feature I’m most excited about. Jesus has been good to us, and we want to tell people about that, even when they’re on their couch or standing in line at the store. In the last month over 14 percent of our web traffic was mobile. With the new mobile-responsive design, the site will be much more accessible, making it easier to read, watch, or listen to how it’s all about Jesus.

Search

The old blog was a separate system and searching the blog would not search the Mars Hill Media Library, and vice-versa.  Now there’s one search to rule them all. We’ll be fiddling with the knobs a little to refine the results over the next week so they’ll always be getting better.  If you know you’re looking for a blog post instead of a sermon, for example, you can now filter by content type.

Share

We want to make it as easy as possible for you share blog posts, sermons, pages, and videos with your friends family and co-workers.  We’ve standardized our share links across the site to make it easier to like, tweet, or +1 anything you find.

Focused content

Marshill.com previously served a global audience while trying to get people connected to their local church.  With the introduction of pastormark.tv for the global audience, we’re able to focus marshill.com on the local church.  We’re building better pages to introduce people to weekly services, Community Groups and other ministries.

What’s next?

We’ll continue to refine things over the coming weeks.  We’ll also be adding author pages so you can more easily find a sermon or blog post if you remember who it was by. We’ll also be creating better sites for each of our locations to better serve our local church communities.

Love it? Hate it? Not sure? Send us your feedback.

Seth Faxon is a deacon at the Ballard church and the managing software developer on the Communications team.