The Upgrading of the New Life La Mesa Church Website
Repeating the introductory paragraph of what I said on the Portfolio section: New Life La Mesa Presbyterian’s prior site had lots of visual clutter, many structural limitations, no categorization for Sermons, limited to non-existant categorization for the Pastor’s weekly blog posts which had accumulated up to more than 90, and there was no effective way to post important up and coming events on the home page. Over all information retrieval was difficult and the site experience was frustrating, sub-par.
The Usability of the front page had to really work. Church-goers are an eclectic mix: there’s the younger crowd, familiar with and big on online use, then there’s older members that may rarely go on the internet. The front page was structured as follows:
- “New Here” button: this welcome button, so important for a church site, leads to a page dedicated to those finding the website through a search, reference or link. There’s a friendly welcome paragraph with directions, contact info, sermon & blog links and worship times. Below the New Here button is a “Twitter” feed, which is populated by scripture verses relating to the current liturgy and events.
- Navigation: on a site with nine main categories and 5 blogs, the need for acute organization was imperative. All sub-categories set as “drop-downs”.
- “Hero” rotator: this area is a visual gateway into the site. Each image links to a respective page. It is also an effective way to call attention to events.
- Sermon media bar: the most current Sunday morning sermon can easily be played from the home page with a download option button. The large “All Sermons Here” button leads the user to the sermon main page. Most people are as interested in the Minister as they are the church. Others, such as those that aren’t comfortable with the internet, can listen to the latest sermon from the main page.
- Liturgy post: every week the church’s liturgy is posted (normally Thursday’s) for the “up and coming” Sunday worship. This can be used to read and study the scripture and hymn references to prepare for Sunday worship.
- Right column: first in line “toggles” are used to hide important but clutter producing information. The first for worship times and second for links to download the church’s newsletter in PDF format. Further down are links to the Pastor’s and the Mission’s blog posts. Upcoming Events’ – links fed from the calendar section is placed below this.
- Footer: similar information is displayed here except one very important button – under “New Life Community” is a “Log In Or Sign Up” button. This leads to a social website – still under the NLLM website, that allows groups in the church to securely communicate with each other and to post a number of file types.
The site was implemented at about a 30% savings to the church’s prior vendor and the monthly costs are close to 60% less than before.
This was the result of researching many templates and Content Management Systems (WordPress was chosen). For visual lighting up of the site, read my synopsis in my portfolio section. For the deeper coding help, D3 Solutions did a stellar job with the complex back-end customization and some of the more simple implementation of the theme as well.
The upgrade involved transferring content from about 17 pages, 90 plus blog posts, and re-linking and re-categorizing over 280 sermons.
The site was implemented at about a 30% savings to the church’s prior vendor and the monthly costs are close to 60% less than before.