New Hope Church: New Design!

The last update I had for the church web site
was in August
. I'm now proud to announce that the new design that Jay Risner put together for us is now online. I want to use this blog to briefly talk about the design, but mostly to map out where I hope to take the site next.

Design and Administration

The design mostly speaks for itself, though there's one hidden piece which is kind of handy. One of the difficult things about Drupal from a design standpoint is the fact that the CMS backend isn't in a backend. That is, with many other CMSes out there, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Magnolia you work in a separate interface to do the work of creating new stories and articles. The web designer doesn't have to cope with these at all because no casual visitor will ever see them. With Drupal, however, the admin interface is integrated with the front-end of the web site. Drupal merely adds another set of administrative menus and screens into the front-end. Thus, you have a long set of menus that your design has to cope with.

In the case of the new New Hope Church design, you can't just let this menu go into the sidebar because the sidebar was designed to be simple. The solute we came up with was to create an extra sidebar that sits in the brown background to the left side. I got the idea for this from the Trac
web site which places a menu on the left side of the main column and ads on the right. Since Jay's original design was so well-structured, it was really just a matter of creating an extra float to sit off to the left to work it in.

Looking Ahead

Looking ahead to what I would like to do with the site next I see a number of different sub-projects that need to be handled. The most obvious is a few incremental improvements to the new design. I cobbled together the current front-page and I don't really care for it. I need to get all the pieces of the front-page looking and fitting together better. I would like to move the login to a bar just under the banner. I would like to get all the columns laid out and pretty. I would like the directions to include a map. I would like the Flash banner to look better when Flash isn't available. Etc.

Speaking of maps, I would like to incorporate more maps into the site. There are a number of nifty things we can do with maps if we just take the time to implement them. For example, our church considers the central gathering to be only a small part of what we do. We could make that much more obvious if we added a map of the LIFE groups and other smaller meetings that take place throughout the week. Being in a college town, we send out quite a few members and it would be nifty to see a map of where our "alumni" have gone.

I would like to make it a community organization tool. I would like to see members come to the web site to find out when and where things are happening. It would be nifty if there was a way for groups to record recent happenings for their members to read about. It could even include things like a current list of prayer requests and other information. This would allow alumni and those who missed something to keep up with their groups similar to the way I keep up with friends I don't hear from often via Facebook
. It could help facilitate discussions such as helping to arrange who's going to bring meals to a family or who's bringing which dish to a supper meeting. This could help avoid the mess of email lists each group maintains themselves.

A frequent request is for a member directory to be placed online. This could be done if access to the directory was regulated appropriately. It would be great to be able to have this information online for people to change as soon as the move or to let former members keep their information available for anyone who wishes to stay in touch.

And finally, back to the mundane, the site is really disorganized right now. I need to establish some order for the site if any of this is to work in a way that will be useful. Since I'm hoping to allow the structure to be somewhat organic, the structure must be somewhat fluid so that it can grow and flex to fit differing needs. On the other hand, certain pieces of information need to be highly structured (such as information about leadership, beliefs, and other fact sheets) and I need to provide for this as well.

Anyway, there's a lot to do on the site. I just hope that I have time (or help!) to get it done with a baby due any day now.

Cheers.