Calvary Chapel, Seattle
Client
Details
Calvary Chapel is a Christian church in Seattle, Washington. The old web site was built with static HTML, font tags, and JavaScript rollovers on the navigation images. It desperately needed a design face lift. As a member of the church, I originally volunteered my services to the staff to clean up invalid HTML and help with broken links and content updates. Shortly after work began I sat down with the senior pastor and proposed creating a small team to investigate redesigning the site from the ground up.
The team consisted of myself, a graphic designer, and a developer. We worked with the staff to brainstorm ideas and develop a scope of work and a timeline. Our biggest goal was to allow anyone on staff (and people within the church) to update content. Our second goal was to reorganize content in a way that made sense to site visitors. And our last goal was to give the site a new theme that reflected the mission and personality of the church.
We settled on WordPress as a content management system (CMS) as it is fairly simple to setup, use, and maintain. It also has a flexible template and theme system which made it easy to implement the graphic design for the site. The site allows all members to add and update content for the web site. Thanks to WordPress’s RSS feature, the page for weekly sermon MP3s doubles as a podcasting feed. Bonus!
Skills Used
WordPress, XHTML, CSS, PHP, user-centered design
What I Would Do Differently Today
Even though WordPress can be used as a fully functional CMS (and I find it to be one of the easiest to use and modify) there’s still a barrier to adoption for non-techies. I’m sure there are many theories on why this happens but my own opinion is that WordPress is very text-heavy in its administrative interface and this overwhelms people at first. In short, the interface needs better visual cues through typography and graphics (and about 80% less text) and I would go so far as to propose a step-by-step guide right on the main dashboard page with big, bright numbers that walks novices through the writing, posting, and editing processes.
I would also love to investigate adding a forum to the mix on this project. Of course, setting one up is the easy part. Maintaining one and learning how to foster a good online community takes people, time, and a lot of patience.
Originally as part of the project we also discussed creating an online sheet music repository for the worship team. We had grand ideas, including the ability to edit and transpose right in the web interface. This would be an interesting side project that could potentially turn into a business for the right team.
