Nice write up. I’m curious as to how you staged a development area inside of EE. I’ve struggled with finding a good solution to site over-halls and redesigns in EE, without sacrificing current site functionality and visitor-ship.
Ditto on the development area. Working with Git & Rails here at Hashrocket makes going back to EE feel like working in slow motion.
The site looks super great, however. I always appreciate how you create visual interest without resorting to ‘people doing stuff’ photos.
I’m loving this new iteration – an “inspiration” to many to come, I’m sure.
Nice job. Love the stories section. I expect the layout to be copied several times within the near future.
Some very inspiring work in here. The article examples (Practical Atheist and Identity Theft) are gorgeous!
Just lovely.
Wonderfully executed. You make me want to hustle more.
this is remarkable. you make it look so easy and clean that i don’t think people understand it’s genius and the hard work to get a template set up for such design explosion for each story and video. the video pages with the videos lining up to complete the graphic are genius. i want to make sweet love to this site, but it’s a church site and it’s probably frowned upon.
The site is absolutely incredible. One thing I might recommend is adding a “Browse by Series” feature to the watch and listen page. Search and Discover is great, but you’re going to have people who want to come, quickly scroll down to a series (or browse through all the series to find a topic that interests them, not necessarily something they’d search for) and view that series.
Caleb, that’s on the punchlist, but pretty far down (especially considering we’re a web team of 1 right now). That said, you can just drop the series name off the URL and go to newspring.cc/series to get said functionality—though I’m fully aware our average visitor would never think to mess much with URLS.
Completely Understandable…
Joshua,
are you hosting the express engine locally or with EngineHosting?
If locally, what platform does it run on?
Love the re-design! Cheers
Duane Keil
Communications Director
twitter.com/dkeil
@Dunae, we host the site with Rackspace.
About The Author
I'm a graphic designer and sometimes writer living in Anderson, South Carolina. I serve as the Design Director for NewSpring Church. I love Jesus, my wife, Levi's Jeans, good Tex-Mex, and 8oz glass bottle Coca-Cola Classic. On good days I love them roughly in that order. Email me.
The New(est) NewSpring.cc
Sun 07/18/10
Posting ’round these parts has been sparse of late, as my day job has kept me busy. Our “web team” is a team of two, and in addition to other duties, myself and Mr. Spooner have been todo-list-ing our way through a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of the NewSpring Church website for the better part of the last 10 months. The previous version of the site was launched two years ago, and served us well for that season, but I’m turbo-excited about the new site’s potential.
With Spooner’s skillful bending of ExpressionEngine to our will, we added a Stories section to the site to take advantage of the exceptional content a rather large church makes possible. Taking visual cues from some talented people exploring editorial design on the web (mainly The Bold Italic, Laura Miner‘s Pictory, and Jason Santa Maria) we developed templating system that enables fairly quick turn-around (2–3 hours for design, typically less than an hour for coding/publishing) on new stories without sacrificing unique visuals and layouts. For example: Zac’s story, Kacie’s story, and Neicy’s story are all from the same “visual family,” but unique members nonetheless.
Some of the changes were big. We retooled the sermon series pages to give more flexibility on bringing the series branding to life in a bigger way—page designs like Practical Atheist and Identity Theft weren’t possible on the previous iteration of the site. I look forward to exploring and designing for that canvas in the future. We also made sections like Watch & Listen much more about search and discovery, and improved general site search as well.
Some of the redesign process was more about small improvements to existing pages and userflows. Previous pages on the old site had way too much visual prominence, when they only served as a sort of pass-through or filtering page. For example, Ministries doesn’t need a huge visual of people “doing stuff”—I likely just want information about a certain Ministry and I want to get to it quickly. We don’t make a big deal out of singling out individual campuses, as we tend to stick with church-wide events, so we combined all the location and service time information onto one page. Anywhere we could simplify, we tried to. And the places where we felt like visuals could make a more appropriate, succinct impact, we made flexible.
There is still much to do. A website, at least a good one, is never finished, only launched.
But man it feels good to launch it.