December 28, 2004
Grace Ministries International
Grace Ministries International is a Christian Counseling and Training organization with offices in seven other countries. Grace Ministries approached me in the late summer/early fall of 2003 to give their site a fresh new look. The reasons they desired a new website was for the same reasons that many other organizations need a new site:
Confusing navigation- Navigation is probably the most important part of any website. Often website owners add new content and new pages without much thought to the overall structure and map of the site. The result: Visitors come to the site and can’t find what they are looking for or get lost and struggle to figure out where they are. I worked with Grace Ministries to streamline their navigation as much as possible as well as giving the site visitors as many “road signs” as possible to ensure that they know exactly where they are on the site at all times.
Difficult to update and maintain – This is the biggy for most all organizations. Often the site is originally built by someone’s brother-in-law (I’ve been that brother-in-law before, so I know). Then then the brother-in-law disappears and no one in the organization knows how to update the site. So it doesn’t take long for the site to become a dinosaur. Grace Ministries website was redesigned to prevent this from happening. Built on a template, Grace Ministries staff members can update the essential, dynamic pages of the site on the fly from their administrative interface. The plans are in the works to make each block of text on the site easily editable from the custom administrative interface.
Visually stale interface – Grace Ministries wanted to give their site a fresh, simple, clean makeover. We chose to tweak their logo, use lots of white space, traditional looking fonts, and masthead images on each page to communicate that this is an organization that is as timeless as the message they teach.
Non-standard code – Old-school based design led to poor usability and poor search engine rankings. Inaccessible code prevented visitors with visual impairments or with web-enabled phones from getting the information that were looking for. Using valid XHTML code for the content and Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) for the presentation of the site, the site now loads faster and is accessible to everyone online.
Completed
December 2003
Work Done
Design, Programming, Custom Content Management (for frequently updated portions of the site), Logo polishing
Tools Used
Adobe Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver MX, MySQL Database, EZMLM mailing list manager
Programming
XHTML, CSS, PHP, and a dash of JavaScript
Screenshot
