Reloaded: www.peapackreformed.org
April 4, 2008 • (0) Comments
Peapack Reformed Church is a 160-year old congregation that first used the web in 2000. Since then, the site has been redeveloped three times.
This update reflects the church’s growing confidence in the medium and its pastor’s greater understanding of the website’s role in her ministry. Our previous collaboration in 2004 resulted in a Mambo-based web portal with lots of features adopted from the church’s print-media periodicals.
So, for instance, there were Bulletin notices about upcoming events, transcriptions of recent sermons, a comprehensive calendar, and brief religious instructional items. Of course, that model became vulnerable any time the church’s volunteer webmistress fell a few weeks behind on updates.
The makeover targets information that first-time visitors or other people seeking a church will need more than it does congregational communications. So, instead of a jumble of one-sentence announcements that could seem lost out of context, we pared the site’s content down to essential descriptions of programs and services, the Who-What-When-Where-Why of community outreach. The site won’t entirely become a “brochure,” as we maintained and refocused sections containing periodical communications like the Pastor’s monthly letter or lists of Upcoming Events and created a variety of interactive features that encourage visitors and members alike to subscribe and follow measurable conversion paths. This should alleviate the web team’s workload while hiding occasional problems with currency, but more importantly it will provide opportunities to measure ROI for features.
The new site is another ExpressionEngine Core site and uses separate weblogs, field-, and template groups to distinguish sections. As with my other EE projects, I made extensive re-use of embedded sub-templates, conditional tags, and variables and channeled navigational flows to Detail templates to provide entries a persistent Permalink address for SEO performance. The design palette was inspired by colors present in the church’s sanctuary but we otherwise wanted to avoid making another religious website about a building. This produced a cool and sophisticated layout, but the predominance of blue and gray risks a lifeless feel to what should be a stimulating sales piece. (The client resisted my recommendation to place stock photography of people in the pages to add more life and motion.)