Missio Nexus · A new brand, revealed live, with the site to match

Missio Nexus connects mission agencies and churches across North America: a conference, research, a quarterly journal, podcasts, a job board, and peer cohorts. The organization was mid-rebrand with Branches Lab, and the new identity was going to be revealed live on stage at the Mission Leaders Conference.

The public website had to carry that moment. It also had to carry a decade of content living inside a single WordPress and BuddyBoss install that doubled as the member portal, where slow, uncacheable pages were the norm. Hundreds of article, event, and job URLs had search equity that could not be dropped on launch night.

So the brief was two things at once: a site that makes a first-time visitor feel what the brand promises, and a migration quiet enough that nobody in the room would notice it happened.

We started with the audience and the one thing they needed to do: see themselves in the network and join it. That shaped the homepage as a single scroll with eleven acts, from the call to the mission, through the problem of isolation, to proof, membership, and the invitation. One fixed canvas of points runs behind the whole page. It begins scattered, draws together into the Missio Nexus mark, then opens into a connected mesh as you move down the story.

The hero weaves 23 partner logos into that mesh as hoverable points, so the network is the picture, not a stock photo of people shaking hands. Interior pages switch between dark and light themes by purpose, and every motion fails open without JavaScript and switches off under reduced-motion settings.

Under the design is a static Astro build with React only where state is real: the menu, a dues calculator, the logo field. Content from the member platform arrives through a twice-daily sync that snapshots articles, library items, events, podcasts, and job listings, so builds never wait on a 2.4 second origin and paywalled material stays behind the wall.

Migration was mapped before launch. About 800 legacy URLs route to their new homes, old article and journal paths have their own rules, www folds into the apex, and a 404 log watches for anything we missed. Sitemap, structured data, and JobPosting schema shipped on day one.

Launch itself ran behind a coming-soon splash with a cookie-keyed gate, so the finished site could be reviewed in place and opened by hand at the announced moment. A brand hub at brand.missionexus.org followed, regenerating its logo, photo, and film pages from the site repo on every merge.

The brand was revealed on stage at the Mission Leaders Conference in September 2026, and the public site opened the same week. The team described meeting that deadline as a significant accomplishment, and the launch film and logo animation we produced became the pieces the client chose to run with.

Every legacy URL that mattered has a destination, the site builds hundreds of pages in minutes from live member data, and the brand hub gives the staff and partners one place to pull the right logo. Ongoing care continues, and measurement is now in place so the next chapter can be written in numbers.