I Understand the Needs of a Church web Site
I'm not only an illustrator, designer, and developer. I am a trained church leader who has a sense of what is appropriate for a church site. Because of how I was raised and the subsequent journey I took, I also have a broad enough church background to have insight into an entire spectrum of church experiences.
Beyond that, I cut my web development teeth on church sites. For several years, most of my clients were churches, and over that time I have better learned what works best on a variety of levels - visually, content-wise, and so on.
What all this means is that if you are looking for a new church site (or a rebuild), you can be assured that you are dealing with someone who is not only competent, but who will understand the needs particular to your kind of project.
Case Study:
Christ Covenant Church of Grande Prairie
When I was commissioned with the redesign of my own church's site at the end of 2011, there were a number of things we wanted to accomplish. Although this is not a complete list, among the objectives for the Christ Covenant site were:
- Church logo
- Modernizing/updating of visual design
- More user-friendly access to audio
- Refocus of verbal content
- Better mobile readiness
- Wider involvement in site content
It took a great deal of work to achieve these ends.
Preparation
As preparation, I scoured hundreds of church web sites to get a solid sense of current design trends.
This was not uncritical; I always had an eye on the sort of effect different kinds of churches were aiming for with their web sites. For example, many "seeker-sensitive" groups go to considerable effort to appear "hip" and unchurchlike. That would have been thoroughly inappropriate for Christ Covenant, which is very intentional in its ties to history.
In my view, a good graphic designer will not only locate his work within the current trends without being a slave to novelty; even more fundamentally, he or she must ensure that the communication is appropriate to what is being communicated.
By examining that mountain of web sites in my research, I was aided in my goal of designing something fresh without falling into an over-the-top edginess that would not suit Christ Covenant.
Along with visual preparation, I researched more effective, user-friendly ways of presenting audio files. To date, my clients and I had always opted simply to upload MP3 files and provide links. Unfortunately, this leaves no option for the user to play the file on the page, and less experienced Internet users frequently have little knowledge of how to save files. I ultimately combined several approaches: (1) Adopted PHP code that would provide better user prompting for file downloads; (2) on-site media player that allowed each audio file to play within the web page with the simple click of a Play button; and (3) integration with iTunes for those preferring podcast format and more robust searchability.
Visual Design
Christ Covenant did not have a logo, so I started the creative project by developing a simple one which highlight the cross (no surprise) and a globe (to emphasize the outward vision of the church). I created two versions, one with white text for displaying against a dark background, and one with black text for displaying against a light background.
For the main site style, I chose to go with a moderate grunge background. I went heavy on the red colour theme in order to achieve warmth and give subtle accent to ideas such as love (e.g. a red heart) and Christ's cross (red blood).
To help give strong visual cues identifying the main sections of the site, I create large graphic-based navigation boxes under the alliterative scheme: Love-Learn-Live, as well as Listen for the audio section. Additional visual orientation comes from icon-based links for Facebook, the new pastor's blog, and so on.
I also wanted to do something special with the typography. To avoid the mundane, I incorporated recent web technology to deploy a non-standard font (a nice Goudy-inspired variant) for the majority of the text. Goodbye, Arial and Times New Roman!
User-Friendliness
Although the previous iteration of the Christ Covenant site was typically user-friendly, this time around I wanted to take things a step further. In addition to the improvements in handling audio, here are a few things I implemented to keep visitors from becoming puzzled:
- EZ-Read style sheet: Not everyone has 20/20 vision, and although there are ways of enlarging print built into every modern web browser, I went the extra step of making things easy for the user. At the top left of every page is a choice of style sheets: default or "EZ-Read." While retaining the same general layout, the latter uses large black text on a white background to reduce eye strain.
- Master menu: Every page on the main site, as well as related off-site pages, is available with one click from the dropdown mega-navigation accessible by hovering over "Master Menu" at the top right of every page.
Content
Although not as guilty as many other sites from similar churches, in our analysis the previous version of the Christ Covenant site was a bit imbalanced in terms of its focus. While we are unapologetic for placing a relatively strong accent on doctrine, we were concerned this time around to accent things that a new visitor would be likely to encounter when worshipping with us, such as our focus on community and hospitality. We also wanted our web site to be an encouragement both to ourselves and to other site visitors to have an outward focus on the Church's role in the broader world.
In view of this desire, in consultation with the other members of the church leadership, I drafted an entire new section of the Christ Covenant site, "Live in God's World," from the ground up, created a new "Activities and Activists" page aimed at accenting how real people were involved in a wide variety of ways in church life, and rewrote or re-edited numerous other pages on the site, including a complete revamp of the church leadership page. The goal was to make everything more personal.
I also placed an image rotator on the front page, giving visitors a strong initial impression of informal congregational life.
Improved Mobile Readiness
Although it is possible to do "browser sniffing" to check whether a user is on a mobile device, the technique is not failsafe, and there are other users (such as those who are still stuck with old-fashioned dialup - yes, they still exist) who may prefer a simpler site that isn't heavy on graphics and other file-size heavy media. For the Christ Covenant site, I created a pared-back, text-oriented mobile version that includes all the basic information one is likely to look for while browsing from a mobile phone. This involved stripping back the styling and consolidating related information that is spread over whole sections of pages on the main site.
Wider Involvement in Site Content
One of the keys to maintaining interest is to ensure frequent updating of content. While the old site regularly got new sermons added to the audio page, the rest of the site had largely become stale. The new site encourages the involvement of more people in numerous ways:
- Front page activities calendar that is updateable online.
- WordPress-based news page so that multiple contributors can write news stories and post events.
- WordPress-based pastor's blog that all elders can contribute too.
- A new Twitter account for prayer requests (accessible by multiple posters) feeds to the front page of the main site.
- A new WordPress-based members' section has been introduced that ultimately aims to have collaboration for posting member-specific information.
The result? Check it out for yourself at christcovenant.ca.
Case Study Images
