GCI is the family of churches to which my own home church belongs. Even that term “family of churches” is an intentional descriptor that we created to differentiate GCI from denominations. GCI is a group of churches, U.S. military chaplains and affiliated ministries that just like hanging out together. We encourage each other, help each other through difficult times, and try to be family for each other. My job was to take the very corporate-looking website we created in 2008 and rebuild a new site that matched the new brand identity for GCI. A lot can change in 3 years, and that was certainly the case with GCI. The 2008 site was commissioned to be professional, corporate, lofty, complex and business-like. Since then, the idea of “family” has grown to be the predominant direction of GCI, and the 2008 design brief became tremendously outdated.

I began by interviewing and consulting the GCI decision-makers on what makes GCI unique. What are the values and goals of GCI — what separates them from other church networks? What is the corporate culture of GCI? What do they want the experience of member churches to be? These questions and others were what I used to ascertain what the message of the new brand was to be.  They didn’t want to change their logo, but instead wanted to a new website that would represent who they are.

I followed up the consulting with a survey, sent out to a representation of people who use the GCI website — member churches’ leaders and staff, GCI admin staff who would use the backend, and normal people who would go to the site to see what’s new in the GCI network. I combined the results of that survey with the goals of the GCI leadership and began to craft a design that would “say” all of that.

The site is built on WordPress for easy management, and I have created training videos to enable the GCI office staff to maintain the site. I also provided internet consulting services to the staff.

Click to visit the GCI website.

I oversaw merging the TSI template with the Joomla CMS, troubleshooting and optimizing the site for Joomla. I’ve done a lot of work in Joomla and was able to help ensure smooth operation of the site.

During development, we realized that TSI’s template wasn’t fully fleshed-out with its styling, so I was able to design new CSS type styles and Joomla module styles, as well as an accordion AJAX menu and other extensions.

It seems to have worked, because the TSI staff has taken our training and continued to update the site. Hopefully they’ll continue to grow!

It’s always interesting working with/for family members, but I’m really blessed with cool relatives. Jon is extremely creative and easy-going, so it was fun working with him on getting a website up and running. I used WordPress so that he could hop on and maintain it as needed, with some well placed widgets on the homepage and sidebar.

I’m pretty proud of the photography too! Head over and check out his site, and while you’re there, I’d encourage you to support Jon by buying his album. It’s a true piece of modern folk Americana, and you won’t be sorry.

The Woman’s Club didn’t really have a definite logo, so I created a customized script logotype for them that they could identify with.

As part of the package, I maintain the site for the Club on an ongoing basis, adding new photos when necessary and update the content on the site.

I used a gradient on a almost-neutral gray background to reference the spotlighting employed in the gallery and the fonts I chose are all created by Jos Buivenga of Exljbris, a Dutch typography company.  The “A” is set in Museo 900 and the brand’s fonts are Fontin Sans.

You can visit the Affinity Gallery website here.

Awaken City Church needed several things: a way to quickly showcase upcoming events and sermon series, play videos, have realtime Twitter updates from various Twitter accounts, post sermons online, blog, display a map, have multiple administrator permission levels and have the usual “About Us” material.

To provide a solution, I used the Joomla content management system with the K2 component for user and article management.  This setup allows church volunteers to manage the site without having access to sensitive information on the site.  I created custom graphics for the site which go along with the brand’s ideas of graffiti, inner city, underground movement/power to the people, etc.

Below are two more screenshots of the site.

Custom graphics displaying photos of church leadership. Twitter module on right.

Screenshot of Google map integration

This project included several other elements, which each have their own portfolio entries:

Awaken City Church logo and brand design

Pre-launch promotional card design, tee shirt design and exterior signage

My solution for Jennifer was to do a custom WordPress installation with a custom theme, adhering to her corporate identity, and train her enough so that she is empowered to keep the site up to date as she moves forward.  We worked extensively on the look and layout of the site—especially the front page—until it matched what she was envisioning.  I also helped her bring her business into modern social networking, using Twitter and Facebook.

The site serves two functions: to provide a store front to sell their products (both food and non-food items), and to give their customers lots of articles to read.  At first, I organized the site via two menus: Explore Coffee and Buy Coffee.  Since they used my CMS service, they began writing up all the “Explore” articles during development while I set up the store.  They ended up not using the simplified two menu system, opting for a less-organized approach.  To solve the usability issues of having unclear navigation, I added a section to the top of each page with two custom graphics that link to either the main Explore section, or to the Store Front.

The look of the site is based on the corporate identity that I created for the Captain’s Coffee, including the logo, logotype, color scheme and the overall “feel” of the site.

Because of the CMS service, the business’ employess and owners can change anything on the site that they like.  They told me multiple times that they love the way they are able to update the site, including all the store’s products.  They had been using an ecommerce solution called MonsterCommerce, provided by Network Solutions.  It’s a rather cumbersome process to get anything done on a MonsterCommerce site when compared with the system I give my customers.

So far, the feedback from both my client and their customers has been glowing!  Their older customers find the site intuitive and easy to navigate, and their younger customers enjoy the updated look and the security of the integrated credit card payments with SSL encryption.

Have a look and let me know what you think!

I also set up a small blog site to help those involved begin to build some internet buzz around the event and created a Flickr account for pre-production photos.  To help the artists and coordinators, I wrote a series of “How To” emails designed to help everyone get past some fears about blogging.  It’s interesting to me how many people are hesitant to blog because they feel that their writing won’t be appreciated, so I took some time to help them catch the vision for what a blog can do, and they really are having fun with it!  It’s been great to see a group of people step outside of their comfort zones, and flourish because of it.

Some special functionality that I built into the site includes a simple registration page that tracks all the registration information, and links to the conference sponsor’s PayPal account.  I also set up Twitter integration and did all the copy writing on the site (besides the blog posts).  In addition, I took care of registering the domain name, opening up a hosting account, and installing the blogging software.