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.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence & having it last in your absence.
—Frances Frei

I’ve been (back) in my role as Design Director at NewSpring Church for 2 years now. From a purely practial standpoint, the team I serve with has produced some great work in that span—a revitalized brand identity, a new website (a newer one is on deck), and better overall visuals, public spaces, interiors, processes and systems. I think it’s the best job ever.

What we haven’t done well is replicate ourselves and train up people within our community to be better than we are at what we do. We run a lean team; everyone on board is extremely high-capacity and more than capable at doing their jobs. But when it comes to specialized roles, work, and projects, we suck at raising up people. None of us would argue that.

In the marketplace, there’s no competitive advantage for me (individually) to mentor others. Mentorship and investing in the next generation can help the bottomline for the company or organization, but unless I’m a partner or shareholder (or just a wildly generous nice guy) there’s no reason for me to take away from my work to help others become better at theirs. In fact, there’s the possibility that by doing so I’ll mentor myself out the door by giving my coworkers the tools they need to take my job. This is scarcity mentality at the core. Survival mode.

But I don’t work in the marketplace. I love working in the church, and we play by different rules. If I “aspire to oversee” an area of our church, I’m supposed to be able to teach. And if I’m a teacher, I have a very specific task:

And [Jesus] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…
—Ephesians 4:11–12

Equip. Work. Build. Equip to act, not to sit and watch. Equip the saints, not fill the seats. Help others grow in their gifting, not hoard my own. If leadership is about making others better, permanently, then I have some work to do. And it has absolutely nothing to do with design.

Your staff culture has to represent the culture you’re trying to create in the wider church. That’s one of the biggest misses in contemporary church work. You have a business-run, top-down, bottom-line culture yet you’re trying to bring around a loving, transformative culture in your community. It just doesn’t work.
—John Peacock, Willow Creek Community Church

Obviously, working for a church I feel the weight of this in a very specific way, but I also think the overarching thought plays out in the marketplace as well, in every type of organization. You simply can’t create a macro-culture that doesn’t reflect the micro-culture inherent in your leadership. You might try to fake it for awhile, or cover it up with advertising, marketing, and lots of words, but eventually people will feel the dissonance of who you say you are versus who you actually are.

Is the nature of the relationships around this [leadership] table worth exporting to the rest of the church?
—Randy Pope, Perimeter Church

Again, church or marketplace, it doesn’t matter—if you’re leading, by definition it means others are following. Are the motives and actions of your leadership what you want to instill in people? Are you leading them where you want them to go?

I’ve already written about this topic (see: Copying Doesn’t Hurt Me, It Hurts You) but I want to look at it from a different angle.

Our church website is copied a lot. I’m not saying that in a prideful manner, but simply as a stated fact. I get a “hey, this looks familiar” email at least once a week. As a Christian and a church staffer, I’m mostly on board with it—”same team” we often say. There’s no competitive advantage for us to have a unique website, because this isn’t the marketplace; we’re not competing with other churches. We want to see them succeed. But as a designer, as someone who is passionate about clear communications, it makes me sad.

When you copy an existing site you probably get a decent end-product, but you don’t know why. This is about more than copying design/visual cues, it concerns me to see churches borrowing copywriting style and information architecture. Why? Because you’re borrowing a voice and thought process that isn’t you. When I see a site with the same user flow as ours, all I can think is, “you don’t know why we did that. Your people are probably different.” The way we’re structured, the way we communicate and plan events, the kind of things our communicator(s) say, they’re all different than you. Not better, just different.

But if you homogenize the end-product without understanding the process that led to the original, your website will reflect who you actually are less and less. You’ll keep being you in person, because you can’t help it. But your website will be someone else. And that dissonance is eventually perceivable. A website is the first impression most people have of you; will their physical interactions with your brand feel like the same thing?

Just be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde

By all means, look at others to learn. Ask questions. But ask the right questions. Ask why something is the way it is, don’t just accept it as globally good. Don’t just look at our website (or anyone else’s) and copy it. They’re not you. And being you at every touchpoint is far more valuable than having a slick website.

The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, button-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.—Tim Keller

I wonder if Keller would include his own church in the same category? (That’s not a cheap shot, it’s an honest question. I wonder if anyone is getting this right?)

There’s a 30×10′ curved wall in the NewSpring student building that’s been blank and lonely for far too long. I can’t wait to see this thing come to life at full scale next month.

My hand hurts, the old scanner is tired, and I killed my fair share of Bic GripRollers in the last two weeks. I’ve never worked on a project where I said, “Oh, it’s almost done… just one more hour” so many times. Then again, I’ve also never gotten the chance to run amuck with 300 square feet of environmental graphics that will visually anchor a public space either, so who’s complaining? Not this guy.

Back in October I wrote a post about building a team that’s better than you and said, “For [my team at NewSpring Church] to accomplish great things, I have to make an intentional, concerted effort to not be the smartest guy in the room.”

I’m happy to share with you a major step in that direction. Detail-oriented, good-taste-having, wicked smart Web Developer Adam Spooner will be leaving the grand isle of Manhattan to join our team at NewSpring this summer. You can get to know Adam via his blog Lead Neophyte or by following him on Twitter. I trust you will benefit from doing so.

NewSpring launched a rebrand and a new site 10 months ago to coincide with the opening of our second campus. Since then, we’ve opened two more campuses (one completely web-based) and seen our overall web traffic double, downloadable media bandwidth triple, and video streaming bandwidth almost quadruple. And let me assure you, internet, we have been over my head and talent capacity in regards to web development and all that it entails for every bit of that time.

But that season is coming to a swift end. We’re about to do some damage.

1. Slept for 12 hours
2. Perused faithful reader Danielle Hartland’s notes from our comm/web strategy breakout
3. Watched Reality Bites, an episode of Heroes, and a hat trick of The West Wing
4. Read through Ken Wilson‘s notes from his video/motion graphics breakout
5. Agreed to teach at the Dirt Conference in November

In approximately 8 hours, a few thousand people will begin sleepily arriving at NewSpring Church for our annual Unleash Conference, a one-day gathering designed to challenge, encourage, and motivate church leaders.

I’ve been busy getting that day-of site up and running, along with prepping two speaking gigs—one on Communications & Web Strategy with my partner in comm Suzanne Swift, and superquick 10 minute soapbox on Cultivating a Creative Workplace Culture. I just used a stopwatch to time myself on the soapbox spiel, and it’ll be down to the wire.

You can tune in to the main sessions on the day-of page starting at 9:00am EST; we’ll be stretching Mogulus‘ limits on free streaming. The soapbox sessions might be streamed, too, along with some other Atrium antics.

I’m excited. For now, sleep.

You can get to know Nick and Tony on their respective blogs. They’re good chaps to know.

Posting has been a little more sparse than usual lately. I’ve been in big project land getting the NewSpring Web Campus (live on Sundays at 11:15am and 6:00pm EST) up and running.

For the tech specs crowd, we’re using our current video-on-demand vendor Lightcast Media for the streaming video and live countdown, a hodgepodge of AJAX stuff for the chatroom (I’m exploring other, more scalable options right now), and the site is built on our existing ExpressionEngine install, which makes updating things a lot easier on me. We’re currently using an AOL Wimzi widget for limited live prayer until PHPLive! can sort out their issues and let us give them our money for their extremely flexible multi-operator system.

I started wireframing this in late October, took a few weeks break, buttoned up the first round of .PSDs in mid-November and then started talking to a few web developers to find a good fit to help me with the heavy-lifting. By late November the layout was finalized (ish) and we began development in early-December aiming for an ambitious January 4th launch.

Too ambitious. We had one development snag over the Christmas break, and then we contracted with the lovely and talented Paul Armstrong to help finish out the site for a February 1 public launch. Oddly enough, in order to hit our (still yet ambitious) deadline, I ended up doing way more front-end code than I ever planned to (because anything more than “absolutely none” is actually more). I’m sure at some point someone who knows what they’re doing will be brought in to tidy up my hackery, which will likely coincide with a phase 2 (online user map/count, better live prayer UI/platform, and some other prayer-related features) and a phase 3 (packaging up a simple CSS/HTML free install of a web campus that other churches can easily set-up and use with the streaming vendor of their choice.)

Big props to our Web Pastor Nick Charalambous who’s running the show and the volunteers and Will Rodes, who’s responsible for the video components being what they are and where they need to be. I just build stuff, they make it happen.

Update: if you’re after the technical aspects of the video capture process, Will has a great write-up full of acronyms and schematics.

Dear IE6 is a site devoted to people venting about Internet Explorer 6.

As web designers/developers, most of us are trying our best make sure everyone who visits a site has the best experience. IE6 makes that harder. It’s is close to seven years old and doesn’t fully support a number of standards established as far back as 1996 for web development. Developing for it sucks; it requires more work, effort, troubleshooting, frustration, etc. I wish everyone would download a modern browser like Firefox, IE7 or Safari.

But they don’t. They haven’t. IE6 is still widely used. It’s still 15% of NewSpring‘s traffic, and while I wish we didn’t have to spend the extra time to develop for it, that 15% equals HUNDREDS of people a day. For some folks (Apple’s MobileMe and 37signals come to mind) they think the tradeoffs are worth it. That’s their prerogative. But for us, for a church whose main web strategy is “get content into the hands of as many people as possible,” ignoring 15% of them because we’re too lazy to do the work is a halfass strategy at best. It essentially says “we don’t care about you because we think you’re stupid.”

You’re a web developer—know your audience and learn how to make your website work for them, even if they’re behind the curve.

P.S. if our Web Campus launches with full IE6 support, it’ll be a miracle. But I’m working on it.

For our Christmas services at NewSpring Church, Ken Wilson made samples in Reason, loaded them into the iPhone app Beatmaker, and then we used them to “DJ” opening sets as everyone arrived to the service(s) at our campuses.

Ken and Daniel tagteamed it at our Anderson Campus. I was on at our Greenville Campus. I replaced a few of Ken’s original samples with some of my own (handclaps, Charlie Brown, George Carlin, etc.) for a slightly different flavor. Ken has lots of details and source files here and here and here, or you can download my Beatmaker kit here.