I find myself in need of some people who can give constructive feedback on something new and exciting.
If that’s not you, then feel free to go back a couple of posts for some hilarious goats.
If it is you, we’re a couple of days away from launching a new website at Creek Road – this has been a labour of love for a few of us for a month or so – including a pretty handy web developer who can do just about anything, a writer or two, and some talented graphics types, and we’re now so caught up in it that it’s very hard to be objective. If you want to check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments here – that’d be great. I’ll update this post with a link to the actual site when it goes live too… I’m hopeful it does what we wanted it to do, and I’m also hopeful that with a little bit more work we’ll be able to turn what we’ve done into something that can be used as a WordPress theme by other churches without too much trouble.
Our big aim is for the website to be something that’s aimed at people who aren’t from a church background, so we want the gospel to be the focus, and to be pretty clear. If you find any unhelpfully complex jargon I’d love to know that too.
There are a couple of things that aren’t exactly what I want them to be – when you hit the link for more posts the alignment goes funny – but that’s the nature of pinboard type sites. I’m hoping to replace some of the wordiness with videos, but words do better things with search engines…
Comments
Hi – just had a look through the website – looking good! I guess it is a deliberate style to use less formal language and have it like someone is talking to you. I think you could shave even more words out and still get the same content across. Maybe even a bit more white space to help the words stand out. However, I am no web designer – just someone who reads a lot.
“Jesus is for everyone – people of all stages, ages, and places – so is our church.” The grammar isn’t right here. Try, “Jesus is for everyone – people of all stages, ages, and places. So is our church.”
I personally think the “Seriously.” is a bit too St Eutychus.
“He’s the key to living the life God created humanity for – a real relationship with him.” This is REALLY clunky. Rewrite.
“We focus on who he is, and who we are as a result, every Sunday.” This is a little bit clunky.
“Here we look at what the Bible says about the human orientation – away from God, and God’s solution in Jesus – who loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are.” I assume you wrote this, because I sometimes get confused by the way you use dashes. This looks like “away from God, and God’s solution in Jesus” is in parenthesis, which isn’t what you mean. Perhaps “Here we look at what the Bible says about the human orientation (away from God), and God’s solution in Jesus (who loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are).”
I’m not one for design feedback, other than–it looks good to me. Seven thumbs up.
OK. Since you asked. A few things.
The “horizontal” and “vertical” pathway stuff makes no sense to me – and I’m a Christian. What does it mean?
“words that are soaked in the good news about Jesus” is over the top and a bit weird.
I don’t like the steel grey colour.
Can you get a better photo of the building? Something a bit arty and different arty than a front on shot – it’s not your greatest asset.
Will there be more photos of people hanging rather than performing?
It seems very based around the Creek road site? Is there anything you can tell us about how you are engaging with the city on its turf?
Hi Al,
The pathway stuff is explained on one page – did you read that? It’ll get a blog post before we launch and any use of the word pathway will be linked to that post.
The grey is the colour of our walls, our logos, and our printed text. It’s part of our attempt to be consistent. We had the orange as the background and it was an eye bleed.
The picture of the building is functional, not artistic, it’s so mobile browsers who are looking at the website on the way to church know what they’re looking for – the building is one of our greatest assets, we’re on a very main road and a substantial
His Nathan
As for the pathway stuff – no. I didn’t read it. I went straight to the page I was interested in and saw stuff I didn’t understand.
I now see what you’re doing with the grey. Thanks.
And I see why you have a front on building photo now.
Percentage of newcomers discover us via the building, again, this is a continuity thing – you drive past, see the url on our sign, and we want you to know you’ve got the right website as soon as possible.
The basing the content around our site is a philosophy of ministry thing – our Sunday services are the gateway to everything we do. You can’t join a Growth Group without coming to a Sunday service, our services are framed in all our material (connect courses, growth groups, etc) as the best way to do evangelism as a church family. The photos we have are the photos we have, as we get more, they’ll change. That’s part of our strategy for not having a static site.
PS – the performance thing says more about the interpreter than the content.
I see a congregation of people who love Jesus singing tohether and being led by a servant hearted music.
Ok. Fair enough. But you’re the one who said you were too close to be objective.
Fair call. That is still true now. Thanks for taking the time to have a look.
Ok. I get what you’re doing there. Thanks.
It’s a mighty website. And I’m getting lots of helpful ideas about how to do things well.
I’m a big picture kind of guy and I just wonder if there’s too much detail. I’ve beech king it out for an hour now and I’m very impressed and I’ve got a good idea of what makes Creek Road tick.
But would you average Brisbanite need to know that much?
Maybe they would.
We’re writing for google too. Not just the average Brisbanite.
Beech king = been checking