The Backstory:
Water’s Edge is the college ministry of my church, 12Stone. It’s more than that though, it’s a community of college students that live their lives for Christ, and truly seek to serve others everyday. One I’ve been a part of this community for 3 years now and will always have a deep love for Water’s Edge.
When I first made the choice to take on web design as a career path, I felt that one day I was going to make a site for Water’s Edge. This was a good 2.5 years ago. A few opportunities came up during these years where Water’s Edge looked at building a site, but I knew that I didn’t have enough skill yet to build a site worthy.
A few months ago however, a few of us started to push the idea of Water’s Edge having a web site again. The ministry was growing rapidly with over 500 in attendance each week, and we had no website. We needed to at least join the 90’s. We didn’t have the green light from the beginning so my basic strategy was to build something so well that it couldn’t be turned down.
Goals and Development:
I started to build the site in mid August, and probably 80% of the development in September. It launched Oct. 20th and I’m still tweaking it. It has taken countless hours, as I only wanted the best for the ministry and the best usually comes around the 27th or 28th time you try.
A fun note is that I worked on the site from a trip to Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines!
My goals for the site and they still exist today are:
- Connect what’s currently going on within the Water’s Edge community with anybody that encounters the site.
- Portray the Water’s Edge culture.
- Equip site visitors with tools to share what Water’s Edge is about and is doing. This is achieved through users sharing the site on facebook, twitter, your own blogs, and websites.
- Give site users the ability to connect with various W|E leadership through online forms.
The Technical Side:
- The backbone of the site uses Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System).
- Studiopress developed the Church theme used to for the basic layout.
- A jQuery carousel is used on the homepage.
- Multiple page templates were custom built to suit requirements.
- A Yahoo javascript media player is used to stream podcasts.
- 14 Wordpress plug-ins are utilized to enhance the user experience.
- Facebook Connect and TwitConnect are used so users can login using their social profiles to comment on any posts.
- The bottom social toolbar is built by Wibiya
Code languages dynamically bringing the site forward: XHTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP.
Random Note: On launch day, the site had 17 pages and 51 posts.
