The Mission Church of Boston site redesign

I’ve worked with PK of Imperial Consulting on several different projects. One of our recent projects was a site design for The Mission Church of Boston where I provided the site design and HTML/CSS and PK hooked in the content management system and other nifty back-end features.

PK IMed me this morning letting me know that there was a huge traffic spike because apparently that is where Senator Kennedy’s funeral is taking place this weekend. I made sure the site was still looking mostly polished and decided this would be a good chance to finally motivate myself to post another design process blog.

The Mission Church is a huge Boston landmark and still functions as a church, but the original site didn’t really do it justice. Here’s a screen shot of what the site looked like originally:

After finding out the main things they wanted to feature on the home page, I came up with four different design ideas.

This provided the church a starting point for discussion. They decided that they wanted a briefer header — no big image at the top — but they liked the use of photographs for the four different sections. The next iteration resulted in this:

As it so often happen with “design by committee,” the discussion went full circle, so a photo went back into the top and the layout dimensions shifted again. I also made a design choice to colorize the photos so that they blended better visually and toned down the overall look of the site. I can’t remember why we went from the parchment letter in the left column to small icons, but I like it better below.

The final change was to add a background color to the page and make the content area pop out more with a drop shadow. We tried white, yellow, and blue. They picked blue.

The transition from full control over HTML/CSS to CMS-generated content (content management system) went fairly smoothly with only a few minor tweaks. Here is the site as it stands today:

As usual, I appreciated PK acting as the manager and middleman so that I didn’t have to sit through hours of design-by-committee meetings. 🙂

• Work and Design