2008 Website Redesign

Here at church, we are six months into a process that will result in a complete redesign of our website and a move to a new CMS system.

While we are very excited about the end result of the process, a sweet website with tons of uber-cool features, the design process has been a bit rocky.

So in the interest of full disclosure I’d like to outline the road we’ve taken so far and the bumps and bruises along the way.

I knew it was going to be tough… redesigning something as important as a website always is… but I never expected the challenges and summits along the way. But it’s been a really opening process and one that I think everyone will enjoy reading about. So Enjoy…

First, our design company gathered lots of input from our staff and details about our church. They then went to work for 5 weeks and came up with this design. From our statements, they gathered (correctly) that our church’s mission was sports related (Turning fans into players on Jesus’ team). They heard us say that we wanted our website to capitalize on the sports theme if possible. But what they returned was not exactly what we had in mind. My fears were confirmed and I knew we were going to be in for along road during the design phase. So we sent the comps back for a rethinking on several key areas of design and execution. We asked that they rethink the announcement section, use our exact logo rather than a variation, move away from dark browns and reds, add area for more photos, and make the site feel more like a lodge/resort/mountain theme.

The second round blew me away. In my opinion we moved further away from the target I had in mind. To our liaison I translated it this way: When doing design work for a client, and they ask for revisions, I have a choice. I can either make their exact changes and be done with the process (no matter how bad it looks) or I can take what they said and rethink my entire design in light of their comments. Our design firm did the former, they just made the changes… it was the simpler route, but not the best one at this juncture. So we had a choice to make, do we simply submit and let the issues go or do we actually press for the changes we wanted. Tough call. In this design, they tried to remove the sports theme and make it more mountain lodge/resort in feel, but we felt they had not fulfilled any of our other requests. So we sent it back with their word we’d have a full redesign from the ground up, leaving this particular one in the dust behind us.

Round three really floored me. I thought I was communicating well but it seems I was not. The design firm had made our requested changes to the photo and announcements area but I felt we were continuing to move further away from a unified design that we could all be happy with. What was I to do? Our contract only called for two revisions and we had met that limit. If I gave it back to them again I wasn’t sure I could count on the design getting to a workable status. In such instances, I typically take the project in my own hands and do it myself. For better or worse, this is my instinct… and it turned out for the worst this time.

We took the project into our own hands, discussed the situation in-depth with our internal management and came up with a site from the ground up that melded what management liked and what I thought looked great. We spent over a week creating our version. We used several designers and got input from a number of people along the way. We used the best layout, the best colors, and the best pieces we could think of. We’d include blogs, frontpage video, rotating worship photos, flash content, and lots of other fun and useful stuff. And below you can see our progress from start to finish….

So I presented it to our peeps here at church as well as the design firm, and neither one really loved it. Uh Oh! :) At that point, what do we do? Neither I nor the firm can get a workable design done. Does this happen to all clients in web design? I bet it churches it happens more than we care to admit!

But the light was finally ‘on’ at the end of the tunnel. This opened up a discussion that has finally put us on track to getting a design approved and a direction that all of us agree is pretty cool. I really love our design form for helping us work through the bugs and kinks. They have a great product, but I am personally looking forward to the end of the design phase. So what took so long? I’m not sure exactly, but I think the most obvious problem to me is this: I wasn’t thinking outside of the box enough.

Stay tuned!

I won’t reveal the actual design and the sweet, sweet setup the Pastor chose until it is live on www.mountaintopchurch.com … sometime in late June or early July. :)