Diary of a Website Overhaul: 3 of 4

Extending Sanctuary Online. Not just building a website. Design, Tools, & Teams.

We are a beautiful church. What we’re doing here, isn’t common. If you subscribe to the words of Dr. King 40 some years ago, “Sunday morning at 11am is the most segregated hour in America.” But not at Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is beautiful place to worship because of the diversity of its people.

One of the biggest criticisms of our old website was that people couldn’t really see who we are. So when I thought about extending our church online, it wasn’t just about what we do, but it was to give people a “sneak preview of heaven” (as Pastor Efrem always says) and to see the faces that make up this multi-cultural community.

I’m a designer.
But there are few things that are harder for me than to feel settled about a design I’m creating for myself. So I knew I needed some outside help. A fresh perspective on the look and feel of Sanctuary. Over the past few years, I’ve participated in the Church Marketing Lab. It’s a place for design feedback and community support. I’d been impressed with the work of Elliott Munoz. He has a talent for web design that I’ve never had. I’m more of a print guy myself. I’d known for a while that I was going to connect with him about designing the Sanctuary site.

We had an initial conversation and I shared with him a bit about our culture, our community, our vibe, and I sent him this wireframe for what I was looking for.

After a few minor tweaks, we ended up with the look and feel we have now. He’s got talent.

Additional Design Element: Photography

Photos. Photos. Photos. To see who we really are, you have to see our faces. So now and moving ahead, I’ve made a bit of a switch in philosophy. I used to think we needed to create graphics for everything and try to limit the use of photos from our actual congregation. I think it was a mistake, especially when you see who Sanctuary is.

So this round, I relied on some awesome photography from Philip Hussong and Amy Mingo. Both are talented and offered up their services. Philip is a friend and has also worked with my company. Amy is a member at Sanctuary and awesome volunteer.

We still have some blank spots, but my plan is to use photography to show the face of Sanctuary on almost every area of the site. Real photos. Real people. A real place to get connected to.

Tools

The other major component was our content management system (CMS).  Aaron Kardell and Cindy Schaller from Sanctuary forged the way as we analyzed a few CMS’s, Namely Drupal and Expression Engine. Our last site was built on an old version of Joomla. Joomla works, but I was really unhappy with a number of things about it:

• I’m a visual guy and I thought the GUI was miserable. (At least the 1.2.x version we were on.)
• Open source is great and free, but thousands of plug-ins and extensions built by “the community” meant most things didn’t work right out of the box. It was a pain to customize.
• Joomla always left me frustrated because the layout and organization of the control panel didn’t seem to make much sense to non-programmer types. (I tried to teach it to a number of people over the years without much luck)

As we talked about the pros and cons of Drupal and Expression Engine, we could have gone either way. Both systems could do what we asked of it. So what it came down to was based on ease of use, non-open-source (I like the way the have extensions that are EE Certified), and a strong GUI. I’m also impressed with the developer roadmap for Expression Engine. I think it will be strong well into the future with 2.0 release coming soon.

Since we’ve started using Expression Engine, I can’t imagine using something else right now. It just works so well. I’m sure drupal could have worked well too, but I just love the organization of EE’s control panel.

Project Management

We used Basecamp to manage the entire web project after the design phase. Basecamp helped to:

• manage to-do lists
• keep track of deadlines
• keep a record of the progress
• keep track of bugs
• have a unified meeting place

Next Up: Content is king, it’s all on the web, Feature highlights, Looking like “Us” not “It.”