Case Study: West Hills Community Church
We do a lot of custom sites here at bluefishdesignstudio.com. The other day I was updating to the 1.6.8 version of ExpressionEngine and counted over 25 installs that I had ready access to that needed updating. That is a lot of ExpressionEngine websites. Well we got a recent contract with a new client and wanted to blog our way through the process. So here goes….
Meet the client
West Hills Community Church is a non-denominational Community Church. They are located in Morgan Hill California, which to the best of my knowledge is a little south of San Jose. They have had a website for awhile. Being located in the Cupertino area their culture is one of Tech Saavy so they had to have a website…lol… Their current website is Mambo and has served them well for quite some time but they felt it was time for a refresh and a move to a new content management system. They had heard some good things about ExpressionEngine and had decided on that prior to contracting with us.
Some things to consider
There are some givens. We will use ExpressionEngine on the site. We will use JQuery on the site. We will use the 960 Grid System on the site. And there are some ExpressionEngine add-ons that we already know we will be utilizing. So we can start to construct our sandbox that we will be playing in.
We also know a bit about the type of content that they will be posting on the site. Most churches have the following on their site:
- Events Calendar
- Ministry Information
- The ability to listen to sermons & podcasts
- An About section that tells of the church, it’s beliefs, and its staff
- A visitors section
- A blog
This is just a basic foundation for the type of content as some churches would add more or less to the site depending on their culture and technological capabilities.
So where do we start?
Well I usually start larger projects like this by creating a wireframe of the home page in Fireworks. I know some of you may be partial to Photoshop but for my workflow Fireworks is much simpler and allows me pixel perfect control of the layout so I can get everything lined up and looking just how I want it. I like creating the home page layout first as it gives me the information I need about the header, footer and navigation and those sections should remain constant through the layout of the other pages. When we create a wireframe we may pay attention to things like font selection and placement on the page but for the most part design is left to the next phase once all of the elements have been identified and placed in their proper places.
Wireframing
So here is our first round wireframe for West Hills Community Church. This has been submitted to the staff at West Hills but no feedback has been given. They may hate it. I dunno. I think we have captured what it is that they wanted on the home page but they may have had something totally different in mind. So the next post about this project may be another wireframe or it may be the design phase.
Case Study: West Hills Community Church - Part 2
So about 2 weeks ago we wrote a blog post about getting started with a new custom website client West Hills Church. Well here is our first update. In the past week and a half our contact at West Hills mentioned that they had a conference coming up and could use a quick site to promote that and get the information out. After a brief discussion it was decided that they will use ExpressionEngine and that they would just utilize our Tudobem template. Excellent! So we got the domain. Configured the hosting. Installed ExpressionEngine and our Tudobem template and after a few hours of work here is the fruits of our labor. Quite a nice alternative if I do say so myself.
Case Study: West Hills Community Church - Part 3
It’s been awhile since I made a blog post about this project/case study. We are probably launching this weekend so I figured while I had a free moment (sic) I would make a quick blog post about the different design revisions that we went through to get to the final site. Make the jump if you want the skinny.
Case Study: West Hills Community Church - Part 4
This is just a quick entry (as I am leaving for sxsw tomorrow) that we have launched the West Hills Community Church site. I will do a more thorough write up when I get back but I thought some of you may want to see how it ended up.
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