Diary of a Website Overhaul 1 of 4

About a year ago, I began dreaming about a new website that would serve our people better than what we had. The last version of our website (which was actually sanctuaryweb_v3) was broken. So much about it was not functional, misinforming, and a pain to upgrade.

Anatomy of the old site:
Infrastructure: Built on Joomla
Designed By: Me
Concept: Get something up whether it’s right or not.
Launched: January 2007

Some of the significant issues with the old site:

• It didn’t connect people well.
• It required us to get people to it, rather than getting itself out to the people.
• Most of the higher functionality I desired didn’t work.
• Joomla. Joomla. Joomla. Left it and never going back.
• Inflexible.

So I had this website, that everybody wanted some presence on, but it just didn’t work well. Not for me. Not for our staff. Not for our community. I started dreaming. I started asking myself some basic questions about purpose. To a point, I had to stop and wonder about what the website was really for.

I went to my friend Kem Meyer’s Blog and started digging through it for valuable insights into Web Strategy.

I came across these helpful links:

How do you “do” web strategy?

• Discover
• Define
• Deliver

Using Discover, Define, Deliver as my guide, I immersed myself into a web process that soon became a much bigger project than just a website. It has become a communication and data overhaul of which the website is just one component.

After about 2 months of soul searching, I knew that there was work that needed to be done before building a website. When I made the old website, I mistakenly built it based on what I thought a website should do, rather than truly trying to extend the Sanctuary Church online. But to have the web presence I dreamt of, I needed to deal with other issues deep under the hood of Sanctuary or the web presence would continue to lag.

Next up: I know what I want, but how can we make it happen? Prerequisites, Conversations, and tough decisions.