Our Say — Blog

JustGod.tv Re-Design

JustGod.tv has been around for 9 or 10 months now, but they felt they needed the site to be re-designed to be in-line with the direction the ministry is heading. The focus of the site is the application of Jesus' teachings without all of the religious baggage. The ministry is focused on reaching out to those who feel alienated by the church and want something that speaks to their everyday lives. As their slogan says: it's "A safe place to connect with God."

Changes & Improvements to the Old Site

The original site worked fairly well and got things going for Today Ministries, but there were some issues that were holding the site's performance back. From a design perspective the old site was a bit bland for its target audience - younger, web-savvy. As we reviewed the site we decided it could use a lot more texture and depth. Two things I did to achieve this were using a marbled background and a font called Astonished for the headers.

To make certain the text popped enough off the background I used an old-school technique to create a 50% transparency behind the text. The content and links columns have a background that is a 2x2 pixel GIF - tiled over the entire area (background repeated in CSS). Opposite corners are 'on' - the others transparent. This gives the text a more solid background and enhances readability.

The header fonts are a simple image replacement technique (text-indent -9999px, etc) so that they remain search engine optimized and accessible.

The large main image was meant to communicate the section of the site the user is in. The front page uses a jQuery image rotator. I used jQuery to display and play the videos and podcasts as well.

Organization (Information Architecture) was somewhat fuzzy on the original site. My first goal was to make it simple and straight-forward. We decided each section of the site needed to be organized into categories. Clicking on a category would reveal the document list. The important thing was to always make the category list visible under each section for easy accessibility (middle column in the content pages).

Mangers / Editors

Making things easy for non-designers can be difficult - especially in a site as complex and large as JustGod.tv. The client has to be able to create new documents and products and to upload videos and podcasts. MODx makes this fairly simple. MODx is the Content Management Framework I use to build websites.

Editors have a log-in that takes them into the back-end manager. What they see is very limited, which makes working in it a lot easier. Creating any new document is the same process, regardless of what type of document it is. The editor simply fills in the form with the proper info, once they choose the template (Blog, Store, Podcast, etc).

Videos and Podcasts are loaded through the manager and displayed on the front-end using jQuery. One note - we decided against displaying and automatically playing the latest video on the home page, fearing it would alienate too many people (Also, it would have added a lot more bandwidth transfer!).

New Store / Cart

As the site grows it needs a framework that can easily expand with it. The original site used PayPal Standard. For this version of the site I opted for FoxyCart - a much more sophisticated and flexible option. I'm a huge fan of FoxyCart. One of its biggest assets is that it is completely integrated into the CMS. That means all of the products are search engine optimized and friendly. Editors of the site simply fill in the form to create a new product, just like any other document.

 

Better SEO

The previous site was built in ASP and lacked some important search engine optimization features, including search engine friendly URLs. This was changed in the new version - along with a few other things - and re-submitted to Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

 

And Then ...

Podcasts and Videos are important aspects of the site. To give Today Ministries more control over content we wanted to set up a system where they can create and load their own videos and podcasts. This was done using iMovie and Garage Band, Apple's easy to use applications. Today Ministries uses Macs in the office. It takes just a couple of minutes to create a podcast and export it for the web. (The same is true of iMovie.) There is an intro and exit movie clip in their iTunes library that they drag into place and go. This keeps production costs low and gives them a lot of control.

And there it is - the re-design of JustGod.tv. Let me know what you think.

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