As a members and designers, my wife and I both have the privilege to design work for the Vineyard Community Church (on the north side of Indianapolis.) While volunteer design work is hard at times due to scheduling and general life busyness, it occasionally rewards us with the opportunity to turn out projects that we love - projects where our “creative itch” has been thoroughly and pleasantly scratched, so to speak.
Volunteer work doesn’t give one unlimited design freedom, as one would think; but at times the slate given to us is truly blank. Over time I have learned that even clients who don’t pay money still deserver a say in the final product. “Beggars CAN be choosers, to borrow an old phrase, because the cause and end result is worthwhile.
The Vineyard’s website design was one of these satisfying projects. The slate was almost totally blank; and what little restrictions I had were more or less my own; as my wife and I are solely responsible for the branding of all the church’s materials.
Visually, the overall goal was to capture the “coffee house” feel of the Vineyard. This is pretty clear in the use of colors and textures. (My wife really got me into textures last year). The design strives to capture the artistic nature of the church. It’s one of the most artistic churches I have ever personally seen, with regular integration of fine art and multimedia into special events and other programs. I was asked to enlarge the logo, but I resisted.
In order to keep things as usable and as accessible as possible, I opted for good semantic markup and tried-and-true tab navigation for global levels, with sub pages being listed on the side for flexibility. I make no use of flash except for video content, and kept the javascript minimal - using it only to fade in the randomized homepage images and to display flash with swfobject, to get any flash used to validate. The homepage at 150k is a little heavy on the bytes for my taste; but it is a sight better than many new CSS websites I see going up these days. I still believe in being nice to the few folks left on dial-up - perhaps out of sheer habit. The images could use a little less compression, but I’ve reached a nice balance of “looks nice” and “under 200k.”
The site is run by Etomite, one of the best kept secrets in Content Management and best known for it’s extreme flexibility; and is tweaked to be as automated as possible so that the editors only have to worry about their content. Multiple editors each have rights to manage their own sections, and have access to automatic image handling and the ability to add photo galleries and flash content with no knowledge of html. Sermons are handled by a nifty mp3 management snippet, which also generates a podcast feed for those who want to subscribe.
I made use of Google for the events calendar and the maps page… you gotta love Google. Initially I searched about for a good solid open source calendar, but did not find anything that I was comfortable with (if you know of something nice, post a comment and let me know.).
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March 28th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Great looking site Ian…especially like how all the multimedia is incorporated.
Regarding the calendar page, it shows some red text on the mocha background that is hard to read (”Events from one or more calendars could not be shown here because you do not have the permission to view them.”), you may want to lighten the text, just my opinion.
Good work!
Allan