Posted by hayesr on January 26, 2007 at 3:46am
I happened upon this church that built their site using Drupal. I thought it was very well designed.
Well designed church site
Group organizers
Group categories
Topic
- Demo/Showcase (31)
- Distributions (11)
- Help (43)
- How-To (35)
- Jobs/Volunteers (3)
- Modules (29)
- Resources (11)
- Social Networking (7)
- Themes (4)
- Groups.Drupal Church (44)
Comments
Excellent design...
I love their design, and their efficient use of thumbnail images to draw attention to, not away from, the textual information. Very well thought out. They've also figured out how to rig the contact module so that anonymous visitors are able to send messages to various departments. I'm still working on that one.
On the other hand, I'm less impressed with their command of taxonomy - for example, in their "what to expect" section, they start off describing what a newcomer could expect at one of their worship services, but then veer into church finances. So in the end, the "what to expect" section becomes more of an "FAQ". Figuring out how best to "nodularize" content so that each node contains only one item (that could be relevant in multiple contexts) is one of the great opportunities Drupal's rich taxonomy features present. Unfortunately, because the whole idea of taxonomy is somewhat arcane to many folks, it gets underused, I think.
Thanks!
Hi all! I'm the programmer/Drupal guy for http://calvarybible.org/. Just wanted to say "thanks" for the kind words, though our Communications Director, Zach, deserves the credit for the design.
ndru, thanks for the suggestion re: the taxonomy. The pages linked from the top menu were meant to be short answers to common questions from newcomers to the church, so we were trying to cover a lot of ground quickly. I can see your point about "nodularizing," though. We're still making the mental paradigm-shift from the sections-categories-content method in Joomla (which we had used for our other site, http://collegelifeministry.com/) to Drupal's taxonomy... I'll have to see about extending the vocabulary to make our implementation a little more elegant. :)
Oh, and re: the departmental contact form, that was actually pretty easy to set up. We just created a category for each department in administer >> contact form, and then used the Contact List & Forms module to present them as seperate pages. Hope that helps!
Great site!
Great site "batdan" and Zach.
I'm working on a similar site for a church in GR: http://www.eastcong.org/
We don't have a great design yet, but we'll get there.
I need to apologize, and thank you
Hey batdan:
Thanks for taking my comments in the spirit in which they were intended, instead of the way they come across to me now that I read them a few days later. What I meant to do was offer you encouragement to explore the great features of Drupal taxonomy, not sound all b*tchy and critical. Nice you that picked that, up even though I didn't express it very well on the first try.
And thanks for your encouragement about the Contact List. I'm gonna give another try at geting it to work for unauthenticated users.
Site Philosophy
This isn't specifically Drupal related, but one thing I liked about the site is the full footer. It's often difficult to find enough content to fill a whole page sometimes and this technique helps make the page fuller. I think it should have a bit more contrast to separate it from the real content, but it's a cool idea.
wow!
That is great! I just finished the redesign of our churches web site at http://www.westwinds.org
It still need a lot of tweaking but it is almost exactly how they wanted it. It is great to see a bunch of churches jumping on the drupal band wagon. And it is very funny that most of them are in Michigan!
We should go to one of the drupal meet up some time and share ideas.
I have also done a community site for the church http://www.communityw.com but the design of it has been on the back burner since i started moving their existing site over to drupal. It would be great to hear of any other church sites using drupal and see what people think about them.
WOW is right
You have done a nice job with the Westwind sites. Good job!
Primary links & secondary links?
How did you do that with the relation between the primary links & secondary links? When you click on students, you get a students menu, adult > adults etc. I'm desperately seeking to implement this function to a church site!