GraceECC.com
Changing gears a bit, this recent project is for a local church in Columbia, PA – my home town. The biggest challenge with this site was that there was precious little to start with. There are no official church logos, letterheads, etc. and there were few ideas presented, some text and a few pictures. Everything was going to need to be created from scratch!
Since this was my first church web design project, I took a long look around the web at a great many church websites, both locally and regionally, to get a feel for some design ideas. I seen some great sites for churches and more than a few that I felt could have been executed better, but there was nothing that particularly caught my attention. I had absolutely no idea of where to even begin or where to go with this web development project at first; I was stuck and worst of all I knew it!
Not finding a church website that inspired me, I simply started working on the project to see which way it would take me. I knew from previous experience working on mainly wedding-industry related websites that using a blog that was integrated with social media plugins was the ideal route to take. So the church was set up with a new hosting account on the River Valley Hosting web server with their new domain name. WordPress was installed and content was transferred to the site simply using the default design for the blog.
After several months of kicking design concepts around, I decided that a simple banner and navigation design would suffice, so I quickly made some design layout mockups of what I had in mind and ran it by the pastor and his wife – they loved it! I then quickly took the design layout and converted it to a PHP, XHTML and CSS template and installed it to the WordPress templating system. Once the overall design work was completed, there have been several updates to the site adding more content, the first several church sermons to create an ongoing podcast series uploaded and plugins have been added from Networked Blogs and Facebook.
The next phase of this project is continuing to add new content as the church gets it ready as well as coaching the Pastor and his wife and some of the congregation in adding content themselves or becoming contributors. I am excited to see where the next few months takes us with this project!
Tags: customized template, grace e.c. church, grace evangelical congregational church, graceecc.com, grahpic design, scripting, social media, template, web 2.0, web design, web project development, webmaster, wordpress
