After months of hard work, we're excited to launch the new Grace Bible Church website today. Website projects are always bigger than you anticipate, and this one is no different. Hours upon hours of hard work went into making this site a reality. Big thanks go out to our development partner, Pinix Design Studio. Karen Thom and her crew were great to work with. Also, big thanks to Wayne, John, Kari, Lauren, Scott, Mark, Seth, Christina, Dan and all those that worked hard to help get this site up and running - thank you.
Because each website is unique, we thought we'd give a general overview of the methodology and functionality of the site in this post.
Methodology
Whenever you're designing a new website, keeping the end-user (that's you) in mind is key. For Grace there are multiple types of people coming to use the website for various reasons. Some people come to the website and want to learn about an event or download a sermon. Others are new to the church and come to the site wanting to learn about what we believe, who we are, and how we do what we do. And then you have people desperate and needing to meet Jesus. In our context as a church, a website is primarily for visitors and not members. It's the church's "front door" on the Internet.
Because our website is our Internet "front door," we tried to make it as clear as possible for visitors to find the information they are looking for about us. This is why you'll see the link to the "I'm New" content in two different places on the homepage. We want to ensure that our visitors are able to quickly find the content found in the "I'm New" section of our website (what we're about, what we believe, what they can expect when they visit us, and how to find us.)
One guiding principle of the development was simplicity. The average website visitor stays on your site for less than a few minutes and visits one or two pages. There's no denying that people on the Internet have short attention spans and want to find information easily and quickly.
In light of this, we cleaned up the homepage, made writing sparse and tried to make almost everything a click or two away. We feel we really succeeded in this. The homepage now contains four "info-frames" to grab one's attention (as opposed to the nine that were on the previous site). In doing this, we'll highlight the most important things we want people coming to our website to view and learn about. You'll also note that there is a larger rotating banner now. This will contain key events, activities, blog posts, and anything else we want to uniquely highlight. Every image will be clickable and will take you to the corresponding subpage or blog post. We limited the amount of verbiage on the website. This means you won't be overwhelmed with information, but you will find pertinent information. We also tried to make everything easily accessible. You won't have to go levels deep in the website to find our great ministries, these are now easily found under Connect. We also purposed to make it easy for the end-user to explore the website by linking to other pages in the site whenever they were referenced.
Finally, for deeper questions, we've made it easy to contact the church and it's ministry leaders. This is on purpose. Many organizations try to hide behind the wall of the web, trying to minimize direct contact. However, we feel that the web is only useful if it actually fosters contact. It's for this reason you will find an email link on every Connect page and at the bottom of every bio page for our leadership and staff. This way you can easily contact someone to have your questions answered. We want you, and the visitors that come to our website, to easily communicate with us.
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