Welcome
About This Site
This is not a real church website. I have created it to demonstrate some of my findings from an independent study I did on Church Websites at Brite Divinity School in the Fall Semester of 2007 under Dr. Russell Dalton. If you’re really interested, or have an exceptional amount of free time, you can download and read the full paper here.
I wanted to highlight some of the key decisions I made in building this site.
General Layout
The width (750pixels) was chosen to accommodate the vast majority of screen resolutions – 800x600 and higher. Also, the “Welcome” on the opening screen is visible “above the fold” for these resolutions as well. While this site is not for a real church, the images are of real church people, not stock photography.
The Front Page
I tried to keep it very simple, immediately accessible to first time visitors. Already I’ve revealed that the main (not only) intended audience of this site are prospective visitors of one of the church services. Thus, the “What Can I Expect When I Visit” page is prominently featured on the header of the index and every page. The index page is intentionally kept free of announcements, etc as to not overwhelm the first-time visitor. My hope was that someone looking at the page could easily take it all in.
Navigation & Structure
The Navigation structure is designed around questions a first-time visitor might have. I hope this is a much more approachable and useful structure than simply an “organizational chart” of how the church operates. Instead of listing specific ministries, I have a page for the mission and beliefs of the church, and then all of the activities in which the church is involved, because that’s the way an uninitiated person would more likely think. I have also peppered the navigation throughout every page so that it would be difficult for a visitor to ever feel lost.
Interactive Elements
Much of my paper discussed the balance we must find in espousing technology in the ministry of the Church. While there were many more “cool” things to choose from, I focused on three whose use I felt would be obvious and immediate – the event calendar, the forum, and the pastor’s blog. As they appear now, they were relatively easy to set up and absolutely free. While I would have liked to make them even more transparent by nesting them into the site I’ve created, this sort of customization was too technical even for me, showing just how quickly these new technologies can overwhelm the capabilities available to a typical church. Now that these elements are in place, it would be crucial for them to be constantly updated. A blog with a last post 6 months ago, or a forum post by a visitor that never gets answered can be very depressing sights, and imply that the church has a negative engagement relationship with culture.
Credits:
CSS Drop-Down Menu from CSS Play
Events Calendar from Google
Forum from Vanilla
Blog from Blogger