December 20, 2005

First Baptist North Mobile Children’s Ministry

Of all the web design clients that I’ve had to turn down, one that I definitely did not want to turn down was First Baptist North Mobile, so thankfully, they came to me at a time when a previous project was winding down.

FBNM’s the church were I grew up. It’s the church where I publicly professed my belief in Christ for the first time. It was there that I learned to love God with all my heart. It was there that I first understood that God wants to direct the life of every person who knows Him toward ministry, and some He directs toward full-time ministry as a career. It’s the church where I worked on staff as an intern in college. It’s the church where Tiffany I met, and the church where we went through marriage counseling under Pastor Ed. I’m quickly closing in on a decade of post-FBNM living, but the positive influence of this great church stays with me.

Mark Messick, the children’s pastor, approached me back in the summer about building a website to support FBNM’s children’s ministry and it’s new program called “KidGrid.”

Here is the work I did for FBNM:

Overall Design – Designing a kid’s site was not as easy as I thought it would be. Using Photoshop, I went through several starts and stops with the design, not really liking any of them. When I finally fell into one I was pretty happy about, I showed it to Mark, and he liked it more than I did.

XHTML/CSS Layout – This is the part where I take the Photoshop design and turn it into a living, breathing website. This is the part where many good designers go wrong. Instead of using tables, and foreground images for layout and thus tangling up the structural content of the site with presentation (design) of the site, I use valid, semantic XHTML for markup code and rely solely on CSS for all layout. I think it’s the only way to go.

Make it Easy to Maintain – Keeping a site fresh is critical. There is never a time when a site is “done.” It’s an ongoing communication tool. When it stops changing it communicates that you must no longer have anything worth communicating. So to help FBNM keep their site updated, I built it with a content management system called Textpattern which allows staff members of FBNM (who aren’t programmers) to edit their site’s content and add new content without having to call me up and work around my schedule. It’s simple to use (with a little bit of training, of course). This is my third site to use Textpattern with, and I absolutely love it.

Screenshot:

Click image to enlarge:

Visit KidGrid.org