West Hills Church: Part 3
West Hills is a community church (for those of you that are not following along) is located right outside of San Jose, Ca. They approached us last year about taking on the project of building them an ExpressionEngine based site. I whole heartedly believe that ExpressionEngine is the best CMS for Churches. Considering I have used WP, Joomla and others to try and provide churches with a viable solution I should know. EE gets out of the way and allows me to do what I need. There is only one area that I feel could be handled better and that is the Calendar functionality which is usually HUGE with churches. EE natively is not all that great. If you use the Repeet Plugin from Solspace then it gets a bit better. I hear that Solspace has a beta for a Calendar Module which I am SUPER excited to get my hands on (psst… Pieman… call me…). Anyway. I digress…
Before…
So this project got started and I had some ideas of how the design was going to flow. The impression I was getting from West Hills was that they were tech friendly but yet slightly conservative. They were throwing around the Apple, Covenant Life and The Village Church as influences. I started down a path with the wireframes thinking more was better and ended up with this… Pay special attention to the logo…
Wireframe
And ultimately added more detail to this layout but still in grayscale….
Taking shape…
From there we got started experimenting with color schemes. Still trying to stay conservative and soft.
Brown and Blue…
I went a little bolder(more sarcasm) with the color scheme and felt confident enough with it that this was the image that we started to really move forward in HTML and CSS using the 960 grid system to build it out….
Brown and Blue…
To add to the story Danny had managed to convince WHCC’s Senior Pastor Mike that the logo that they had was getting dated and did not reflect who they were or where they were going. to which I responded “huh?” We had been working down a path and while I had heard him when he discussed the logo before and how he felt it did not really fit I was a bit curious as to how this might change things… turns out it changed them for the better. Danny asking us to redo the logo was about the best thing he could have done as it unleashed us from the more conservative feel (did you pay attention to the previous logo?) that we had been trying to adhere to and to which none of those involved were really married to. So we sketched up some logos and of those presented they chose… Lots of symbolism in here…
New West Hills Logo
But then I got what is known as designer angst and decided that I hated this design. I didn’t feel it did the new logo justice and that I had learned that West Hills was a lot more capable of handling an edgier look to their site. I called Danny on a Friday and told him that I couldn’t stand the design we had been working on. I had been talking to him more and more and realized that it was not going to fit. And he, being a musician (and I think they suffer from the same angst) told me to go for it and that I had free reign. So I spent the weekend stripping out a lot of the fluff from the previous iterations of the website. I also went darker with the primary color and added a dark red. Danny got Typekit for me too so I was not limited to the base web fonts.
When I sent this off to them they got really excited which is what was missing from the previous versions. The design process had led us down a path of learning quite a lot about who West Hills is. They had a rough idea of their focus as a church which is where the Equipping, Expansion and Expression words come from but couldn’t really formulate that into a tagline or something that really described who they are as a community. This design and the process we have gone through have not only provided them with a new website but also a new logo, tagline and a better understanding of who they are and where they are going as a community. Not that they have changed but they can better put it into words. So… without further ado… here is the finalized design.
Finally….
The next installment will talk about the behind the scenes stuff and handling content…
West Hills 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.
West Hills 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
West Hills Community Church
We do a lot of custom sites here at EETemplates.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
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