It looks a little different around here.
After four years of using our old design, we’re happy to share the latest version of Church Juice with you. Our overall goal was to keep the site simple while working to improve navigation and overall organization.
Since Church Juice has always been about education and learning from one another, here are a few lessons we learned from building the new site.
- Visual elements. There’s no doubt that the visual web is on the rise. The challenge is presenting information with more images and fewer words. While designing this site, we not only added more visual elements, but also embraced the trend of larger images. Ultimately I think this leads to an overall sleeker design.
- Responsive design. We’ve long recommended that churches move from having a separate mobile website to using responsive design, where one website is built in a way that the content rearranges itself based on screen size. Some of you rightfully called us out on giving that advice but not using it ourselves. The idea for this new site came from a conversation more than two years ago about what we wanted to do for mobile users. Responsive design was the answer. (For those of you unfamiliar with responsive design, here’s a post we wrote about it. You can also move the bottom right corner of you browser window to see the responsiveness in real time.)
- Delays happen. The final design for this new site was approved almost a year ago. Like many projects you work on, Church Juice is part of a bigger organization with many programs competing for a limited amount of resources. It can be frustrating to sit and wait on something, but it’s a reality of business. Overall this got me thinking about the importance of setting priorities and streamlining processes. If you’re working on a new website, try to plan ahead and identify potential hurdles so you can be more efficient in problem solving and getting your project completed.
There a few people I’d like to thank for their work on this new site. First, Paul Yuen at Agathon Group for designing the site. He was the mind behind the old site design and did a great job of visually taking Church Juice to a new level. Next up, Marc Miller. He’s our incredibly talented in-house web guy who actually built the site and made the design functional. Finally comes Justin Sterenberg, who helped with usability and freeing up Marc’s time to do his magic.
I hope you enjoying exploring the new site. Like any launch, there may be a few glitches along the way. If you see anything that needs to be fixed, feel free to drop us a line.
(P.S. You may have noticed that The Juicys, our annual church communications awards, has been better integrated into the new site. We’ll have more about this years Juicys in the beginning of August.)
