I was recently hired as the Communications Director at a Ward Church. It has been a blast so far. During the interview process, I was rather disappointed when I went to their website and upon first glance thought to myself, “darn, this site ‘looks’ pretty good…I won’t be able to redo it.” Web design, strategy, and development is a passion of mine and I was really hoping for a website that needed a major overhaul.

Even during the first week or so, I was still thinking that the existing site would probably be serviceable, although it would need some content restructuring and trimming down. But then I started to learn about all the external tools outside of the main website CMS. Independently, these tools were great. They each served a specific purpose, and got the job done. However, there was one problem, they weren’t tied into our main church database, which runs in Arena…and there was no way of making them do so.

As I sat down with different leaders in the Church, the feedback I got was all leaning towards stuff like, “I wish we could do online registrations…I wish we could do THIS, or THAT, on our website, or let’s put videos on our site!” After reviewing my meetings I set out on researching more about Arena, and more about what other churches web strategies are.

I was introduced to Kem Meyer’s book Less Clutter. Less Noise. Kem is the Communications Director at Granger Community Church. I started reading the book, reading her blog…and everything made sense. It started to become clear how I should use everything that I just learned in college. Before I dove in and just bullheaded my way through the process, I’d better take some more steps…I will outline the steps I began to take (and am still taking in my upcoming posts).

As I continued my initial resource, our Director of Finance, @chris_ockerman noticed that Kem was putting on a 2 day workshop based on her new book. I was super excited, and the following week, I was off to Granger, IN at 5 a.m. The conference lasted two days, the first day was more of a presentation/lecture with notes. I learned a great deal of valuable information. The second day, there were as many people, and this time it was a round table discussion. Everyone got to tell their story before we split up into groups to do some exercises. Both days were equally exceptional and provided me with a vision for a framework for my web design process.

I will give you an inside look at the first real steps I took in designing our new website in my next post.

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