In the last article in this series about the redesign of my church’s website I described the process of getting competing proposals for the redevelopment project and the challenges involved. With that done and having received approval by the finance board for the funds needed, it was time to finally get the project started. The big challenge – could OurChurch.Com create the design within a CMS to look exactly the way we wanted it?
Third Consultation
But before we could do we needed to discuss some final details and formalize the agreement. On Day 16 of the process, we had a conference call that included Mark (OCC’s President and Director of Sales), Mike (OCC’s website developer), Tim (Cypress Meadows’ Executive Pastor), and myself. Mark wanted to check to see if any changes were needed to the initial proposal. There were none. Mark then explained the remaining steps before the redesign could begin.
- Mark sends a Preliminary Agreement to us.
- We review and approve the Preliminary Agreement
- Mark sends a contract to us.
- We review the contract and mail two signed copies along with the first payment back to OCC.
We did all that, had our church’s legal representative review the contract and by Day 21 we had a formal contract. Mike could begin the redevelopment project.
Concept vs Content
OurChurch.Com separates the development of all websites into two phases. The first is the Concept Phase. During the Concept Phase the design or template for the website is created. One of the things that makes a content management system (CMS) easy to use is that it separates the design of the website from the content of the website. A professional website developer creates the design (template), which includes:
- The layout of the site.
- The placement of the menus, modules, and content areas.
- The graphics that will appear universally on all of the pages of the website.
- The default colors and fonts.
Once the template is designed, the folks at the church who have no web design skills at all can create and modify the content without having to mess with (or potentially mess up) the design.
Template Options
OurChurch.Com offers three template options for its Custom CMS Express service.
- Standard Template. OCC offers five standard templates, which clients can use for free. OCC will customize the header at the top of the website (sometimes referred to as the masthead) with the clients name and logo.
- Premium Template. OCC has partnered with several template designers to make available more than 100 premium templates. These templates are available at a very reasonable price run the gamut in terms of theme, color, style, and layout. OCC will also customize the header of a premium template.
- Custom Template. If you want a completely unique template, customized exactly to your specifications, OCC will design a custom template. This is most expensive option because of the time and skill required, but it ensures a client will get a one-of-a-kind website exactly the way they want it.
Cypress Meadows’ Concept
As I mentioned when discussing the vision for the redesigned website, the staff and leaders at my church are very pleased with the design of the current website. Therefore, we decided to have the new website to look almost exactly like the current site.
On the one hand that made designing the template easier, because one of the biggest challenges is for a client, who has this picture of what the website should like in their head, to communicate that picture to the designer, and for the designer to be able to grasp exactly what the client is describing. So, to be able to say to Mike, “Make the new site look exactly like this, except for a, b, and c” almost totally eliminated that potential misunderstanding from the equation.
On the other hand, there is a perception among many people that a CMS is boxy and inflexible and a CMS template can’t be designed to have an artistic look to it. If that’s true, then creating a template to look exactly like a conventional web page could be a problem.
Cypress Meadows’ Second Concept
Another unique aspect of this project is that we want the homepage to have a simple, uncluttered look but the internal pages to be full of information. Therefore, we decided to have OurChurch.Com create two templates, one for the homepage and one for the rest of the pages.
Completed Concept
Day 29 Mike contacted us to let us know the initial concepts were complete and to schedule the concept review phone meeting for the next day. The templates would have been completed in less than a week except Mike had to wait for us to get him some pictures to be used in the template for the internal pages.
So, did the CMS prove to be too boxy and inflexible for this design? Or was Mike able to duplicate the appearance of the current church website in the new templates?
Take a look… Here’s a thumbnail of the original homepage followed by a thumbnail of the new homepage.
(If you click on the thumbnails you can see a screen capture of each at 50% scale.) The designs are virtually identical except we wanted the new homepage to be little shorter so the image for the current Sunday series would be “above the fold” and a compact news scroller could be added to the right of it.
Here’s a thumbnail of one of the internal pages on the current website followed by a thumbnail from the same page on the new site.
Again, they’re virtually identical even down to the horizontal lines behind the page title and the supplemental information boxes in the right column. The only significant difference to the internal template is the addition of the images of people at the top of the page, which we asked to have added to give the internal pages a friendly, more personable appearance.
To be perfectly honest, I thought the fact that the new design was being implemented in a CMS would limit Mike’s ability to make it look like the current site. So, I was extremely impressed with the results.
Concept Revisions
After the concept review, Tim and I were given the opportunity to look over the design more thoroughly on our own and request changes. By the next day we had a complete list of revisions – mostly minor things like adjusting the spacing in a few places, fixing some issues we noticed in Firefox. Mike took care of all of them that day, and so we were able to officially sign off on the completion of the concept phase on Day 31.
So, in 10 days the entire Concept Phase was completed from the initial design to the review through the revisions. What do you think?
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