Well - I have certainly neglected posted on here for a while, not on purpose, but out of shear overload of work…the majority coming on the website for Ward Church. Well, nearly 8 months since the last post…and the site finally launched just about 2 months ago. It wasn’t and still isn’t without it’s errors and shortcomings, but it has opened up a new chapter in an online presence for the Church. It will be, and somewhat already is the cornerstone of the Church’s communications. We’ve had no shortage of feedback — that’s for sure…and I welcome it! It has allowed us to make the site even better. Unfortunately because of some technical bugs and some other issues, the site launch was delayed several months. Finally we just put a go live date on it and went with it. That’s not always (in fact, is almost never) the best move, but we realized that some of the circumstances beyond our control would only be fixed once the site went live.

Here is a glimpse into the process of redesigning the site…

After it had been determined that we would be redoing the website, I began by creating a visual sitemap of our existing site. I then looked at the site’s traffic data from Google Analytics. I poured through page after page of content and numbers - trying to determine which pages needed to stay, and which could go, be combined, or needed to be overhauled.

I then researched other churches websites. At this point I wasn’t really looking at the “design” of these sites (although I was paying attention to it) but I was looking at how their navigation was broken down.

I began formulating a new sitemap based on a new structure that was derived from my research.
I then gave a presentation based on my findings at one of our staff meetings. I got plenty of good feedback and went back and made some changes.

After several meetings with others at the church, I solidified a basic structure for the site and after about a month of planning I finally began the design process.

I mocked up 3 different rough designs (Download a PDF of the different designs)

Pictured above is design #3…it didn’t make the cut.

After picking design “#2″ I moved on to creating mockups of different pages, trying different color schemes, and different icons. Once that was done it was time to send everything to the developer.

The developer worked on the site, turning my design into working HTML/CSS and then from there into templates for our content management system. Throughout the whole process I was still making small design decisions, and then debugging errors that I was finding.

This is where I am going to leave off this part of the process…I will conclude with part 3 next time! Hopefully it isn’t as long between posts!

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