Coral Ridge Church launches new web site

Adam Khan, Thursday, June 19th, 2008

Now online at crpc.org, Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s new web site is authored by the church’s staff, with multimedia content such as audio files, photos, billboards and PDF documents as well as web-native news, events, activities and more. EngagingNet was tapped by WebLadyBug of Fort Lauderdale, FL to collaborate on designing and developing the content-managed site. Coral Ridge is the founding church of the Evangelism Explosion movement, which now has a presence in every nation of the world.

Coral Ridge, the Presbyterian church in Fort Lauderdale, FL that revolutionized evangelism and outreach in the 1980s, knew it was falling behind online. Its web site lacked a full- or even part-time team and often greeted visitors with a blank screen. The church contacted nearby web design agency WebLadyBug with a brief.

They wanted a warm, inviting, exciting site with up-to-date announcements, multimedia files to download, online registration forms and a calendar of their many events. WebLadyBug principal Teresa Robotham, seeking content management system expertise, teamed up with EngagingNet to design and develop the new site.

Solution

Content

The site’s architecture is a model of the church’s work. At its core are activities, belonging to ministries and possessing events. There are also departments, committees, projects, persons and roles. Members are handled separately, due mainly to the architecture of the content management system used, ExpressionEngine.

The site’s auxiliary content types include photos and billboards, PDF documents, audio files and online forms. There are also various types of texts—news items, articles of interest, sermons, faqs and about us texts—and there will also be opportunities to volunteer and work.

There is also workflow-related content seen only by authors and editors consisting of requests to fix bugs, change or add content and develop new features.

Workflow

A renowned organization with controversial positions, CRPC is concerned about the contents of all texts posted. Workflow is managed by setting the status of a piece of content. Editors have access to a status that authors lack. If any author saves a change, the status reverts to one that is not displayed in templates and only an editor can restore the status that does display.

(It would be better if the content reverts back to a previous version of the content sporting a displayable status. EE does have revisions but it would require at least a module or extension in the current version of EE (1.6.3) to meaningfully connect revisions with statuses.)

And the homepage: how best to maintain control while keeping things fresh? Using status again, an editor can “homepage” an item, which is then displayed on the homepage according to its content type (news items in What’s New, events in Coming Up, etc.).

Design

Slideshow: Unusually, almost every page can have a number of photos, displayed as a slideshow. Mixed in with the photos can be related billboards, which are PowerPoint presentations produced by the church to hang in hallways that are now routinely exported as JPG files for the web site.

Blurbs: One required field in all core content is the blurb, which assists the title in representing the item when listed on pages other than its own. The discipline of blurbs must surely reap some rewards in terms of clicks on links. The blurb also serves as the lead-in on the item’s own page.

Accordions: To keep pages uncluttered yet be as informative as possible, accordions unfold throughout as signified by a zoom-in icon. With accordions—and blurbs—a ministry can post its entire staff, entire about us text, all its activities, its articles and projects of note, volunteer and work opportunities (coming soon), news and events and a slideshow—all on a single, quite simple-looking page.

Bible Verse: All core content items can have a chosen Bible verse, appearing in a fixed spot on every page as a link to the verse at BibleGateway.com.

Titles: Each page’s title, colored white over the image of the church’s organ and pulpit, is set to just touch the white body area, creating an unbroken shape.

Golden Ratio: As an aesthetic anchor, column widths were calculated using the Golden Ratio (1/1.618), dividing a standard 400-pixel photo by 1.62 to get 247px then dividing again by 1.62 to get 152px.

Menu: Across all pages the menu serves as navigation to much of the site, and any other page can be reached from an item within it. There are some two dozen menu items, each opening its own menu board with ample space to display a graphic such as “Location”’s Google Maps clip or “Founder”’s stills from the D. James Kennedy video tribute.

Presentation

Though they share the header, footer and slideshow, there are four main templates: homepage, ministry, multiple-entry and single-entry. The homepage is differentiated at a glance by having the slideshow on the left. Ministry pages are the most complex, gathering all the various types of content related to the ministry without the Homepage’s benefit of a single status. Multiple pages lack a photo gallery and are lists of items with single pages.

Auxiliary items are always related to core items, and each of these is inter-related, so that if a photo is attached to a news story about a concert performed on tour by a choir, then the system knows that this is a photo connected to that choir and in turn to its ministry. The architectural integrity of a tree is maintained.

Training

Ideally each item on a web site is authored by the person involved in that work, “authoring” meaning not only to write but to post and maintain in consultation with an editor, that is, to own. This benefits the site by eliminating areas fallen between the cracks and ignored and by surely improving the quality of the content both because the author is closest to it, thereby arguably more likely to inject the most telling of detail, and because there is now clear responsibility for it. Also, fully distributed authorship speeds up the posting process fantastically, eliminating the need to send the document to somebody else’s queue for processing, such as to post the changes into the system or to roll the presses. Without fully distributed authorship an up-to-date site would require a dedicated staff.

During two on-site weeks we enabled distributed authorship by training the designated authors in using the system, meeting one-on-one with all the people available. Some authors took to the slideshow, some to podcasting, and they are already helping each other where they can. It appears that a web authoring team is being forged.

Documentation

In process.

Future

Some features requested from the start are yet to be implemented, among them the calendar of events and online ticket ordering for the church’s Concert Series. Perhaps once all these bases are covered and the church’s vision for its web site is completely realized, the site will serve merely as the jumping-off point for Coral Ridge’s work on the web.

Results

“The website looks magnificent!” wrote Rene Barcelo, the project’s shepherd at the church, director of finance and a former IT man himself. “Now is just a matter of cleaning it up as we go.” We’re continuing to work. Today, ten days after launch, we introduced the workflow management setup.