“About Us” and “What to Expect” when you come to Gracepoint, Berkeley

Some pages on our Gracepoint (Berkeley) site feel anemic, undernourished, even atrophied.  Then there’s other pages we’re much happier about.  Take, for example, “Life at Gracepoint.” We definitely like that page.  After all, it reflects who we really are as a faith community.  More than that, the presentation of this content is polished, clean, ready for public consumption.

An example of the anemic and undernoursihed is “What to Expect.”  The page feels unfinished, and though there’s lots more we want to do with it, we just haven’t had time to pull together the content and code up the page so it’s beautiful on the eyes.  In contrast, Nelson and others had done a great job on “About Us,” not only filling the whole section with robust content that really describes who we are as a church and community of faith in Berkeley, represents well our spiritual leaders, including Pastor Ed Kang and his wife, Kelly Kang, but the whole section’s got a slick set of controls and graphics.

Problem was that in the first iteration of our website’s implementation, “What to Expect” occupied the top left content on our main nav bar.  After all, we thought, “When people come to the church website, they want to know what it’ll be like when they come on Sunday.”  That makes tons of sense… but if the page people are clicking on isn’t going to properly answer that question AND it’s occupying the most-actionable region of the page, we better rethink the execution.

And so, it was easy, we just reshuffled our main nav bar, bringing “About Us” and “Life at Gracepoint” to the top.  It’s small, but those two pages reflect the reality of what our community of faith is about.  And, even better, they look good and presentable to the visitors who drop by our website.

Golden Ratio and Web Design

Smashing Magazine has a neat article on applying divine proportion to web design.

ExpressionEngine

Been thinking about using ExpressionEngine for a redesign of the Gracepoint Fellowship Church website.  I think one of the interesting things about it is that it’s well-written PHP.  I’ve had a lot of trouble with the complexity of code behind ezPublish.  It’s virtually impossible to embed PHP in the code.  For the Gracepoint Berkeley website, we use a hack to get PHP embedded, but it’s been really buggy.  So ExpressionEngine seems like a real possibility for the Gracepoint website.  Anyways, I’ll keep everyone posted on this exploration.

Life at Gracepoint Fellowship Church

One of the most rewarding parts of working on the Gracepoint Fellowship Church website was the section entitled “Life at Gracepoint.”  This section was to provide a snapshot view of our community.  Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly Kang cast a vision of allowing people to get a real intimate view of the inner workings of our church.  Our members could post insights based on things that were going and would tie it all into our mission and values.

One of the design decisions I made was to go for an editorial feel, very similar to what you might get on nytimes.com. This conscience decision really paid off because it provided a very organic and warm feeling to the postings, all the while preserving the space above and below the fold.  Kelly wanted a better navigation system, and so I developed a navigation bar based on our church values.   Anyways, I thought it was pretty cool and neat.  Doing a journal/blog system like this is tough to innovate on it, but I’m pretty happy with it. Check it out, there’s chock full of articles there.

Re-designing the Gracepoint Fellowship Church Website

A lot of people have been asking me about how I went about re-designing the website for Gracepoint Fellowship Church.  Well, it’s gonna be a long story, so I thought maybe I blog about the re-design and all the changes that we have planned as well.  Currently, I’m leading the web team, which as it turns out, is only 2-3 people large.  That’s kinda surprising considering Gracepoint Fellowship Church has several hundred people there. You’d think there be more nerds out there.  Oh wells.  

Anyways, the story all started when Pastor Ed Kang and his wife, Kelly Kang, came to me and asked me if I wanted to be involved with the Gracepoint Fellowship Church website.  How could I say no!   I need to dig out some old screenshots, but the old site, was uh, in need of a serious facelift.  So began an almost one year endeavor of design.  I’d show Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang screenshots at our meetings.  We’d go back and forth all the time.  Pastor Ed would point one thing out and then Kelly would point another thing out.  Before then, I wasn’t really doing that much design, so I wasn’t very used to going through so many iterations.  But it was an awesome experience.  If an idea isn’t worth throwing out, it isn’t worth keeping huh?