The future of the web is content focused and responsive.
That is, if you believe me and what I read from a bazillion tweets from An Event Apart. The conference is a web-design summit with some big names in the web professional business: Jeffery Zeldmen, Eric Meyer and other people you know you should have heard of.
August 8th-10th was their Minneapolis conference, during which the world’s best web designers tweeted up a storm. Unfortunately, I don’t remember any of them exactly, but I did get a few big-picture impressions about where web design is heading.
1. Responsive
If you don’t know what responsive web design means, you should read this article. If you’re too lazy to read that, the gist is that you should design content for the web that works across a huge variety of devices, from desktops with 27” screens to video game consoles to your smartphone.
Personally I think this is a great trend on the web (and not just because it means less work for me not having to build device-specific templates). I have yet to see a responsive design on a Church website (please comment examples if you have them), but I think it’s because it has one huge implication for Churches: focused content.
Focused content means less decoration and more text (although images and videos communicate content too).
It’s a lot harder to build a responsively designed site when you have 4 background images, 7 flash videos and an image slider on your landing page. I have to say a huge amount of Church landing pages seem to be about communicating a highly graphical identity, which isn’t necessarily bad.
What I’m trying to say is that responsive web design requires a focus on content that doesn’t exist on most Church websites, or actually, most corporate websites. Which leads me to my second trend in emerging web design.
2. Content first.
Content first design is pretty self explanatory. Create, edit and refine your content before worrying about visual design. Visual design without content is just decoration.
Having just gone through a redesign with a Church, I can say that we did not do “content first”. We used the “content as we go along” method. Our site has a lot of decoration, but not a lot of content.
Anyone who has tried to build a mobile website knows that when your screen real-estate drops, you have to prune your site. In most cases, this means getting rid of quite a bit of content. When you have to get rid of content two things happen.
- You combine content that should have been combined all along.
- You get rid of content that never really needed to be there.
The principle of content first means pruning and refining content before you ever draw a sketch of your site.
I don’t know that the birth of mobile browsing means the death of multimedia websites with lots of animations a complex presentation, but focusing on content first is a great strategy.
Knowing what you want to communicate is essential to deciding how you communicate it. So often we reverse the two.
What trends have you seen in emerging web design?
[Image via Mike Rohde]
Brian says
I recently launched http://www.mission68.org which was a project I hope will raise the bar an help inspire other designers working on church projects. If you’re interested in some of the features and strategy that went into this year-long project you can read about them at: http://www.mission68.org/mission-blog/whats-new-about-the-new-website/
Thanks for this article! I hope we continue to take church web strategy seriously and incorporate not only trends but also thoughtful strategies to engage & communicate!
Brian Notess says
Great job on the design, Brian, wow.
That level of polish on a church site definitely sets the bar high.
The Mission 68 site content seems similar to a lot of churches website that I’ve seen; animated slider of news items, 3 calls to action and a bunch of feeds. Sites I’ve done fit right into that model too.
I’ve been wondering if that model is realistically sustainable because of the rapid increase in mobile web browsing. Obviously, porting it over to mobile is an option, but the “mobile first” movement seems to make a lot of sense to me.
It also helps cut down on the clutter. What are your thoughts?
Brian says
Good thoughts. I’m not sold on mobile as the primary focus quite yet, and our analytics support that. While MISSION is a church where many have smart phones we are not yet seeing the overwhelming stats what would suggest a mobile environment is where people want to be. There is a very basic mobile version of the site you can see if you visit mission68.org on an iPhone/Android. We are actually getting ready to put together some focus groups to discuss the mobile strategy at MISSION as a next phase item.
In my opinion the primary audience for a church mobile environment in a church is regular attendees with the secondary being people looking for basic information and next steps.
Because most churches do not “do” the web very well to begin with I think it’s a stretch to expect the local body to make huge jumps from bad or nonexistent web strategy to incredible mobile presence. We are still trying to get people to embrace the idea of returning and engaging with the standard browser site and getting used to the idea of a new set of features.
It’s kind of like the iPhone – I’m sure several of their software and hardware features were ready well before the launched, but, not only are small releases a way to generate profits, but also a way to take people down a strategic usage and feature path.
Our brains are designed to filter out clutter and ambient noise naturally, but, if we can teach people thru small steps to notice, use and even depend on certain features then perhaps we can incorporate even more functionality into a mobile environment that mimics what people have already come to expect?
I don’t think it will always be this way. Even with the release of OS X Lion you see that Apple is now taking people down a path of getting used to features (and look/feel) that began in the mobile environment (for example the grouping of apps, restored state applications and general app animations). Perhaps soon the overwhelming priority in the church will be a mobile audience but I think most churches are just now getting their feet wet.
Brian Notess says
You’re right on. Mobile first doesn’t make sense for most churches. We still have a large percentage of users who use IE6, so yeah.
I think what I like about the mobile-first idea is that it forces content refinement. I’d love to start a design process where the client/church has to work within the limits of a mobile site, then can expand to desktop. I feel like contraints help everyone be more efficient and creative when it comes to content.
You’re right. Realistically the demand for mobile sites at most churches isn’t very big, but I love the content-first thinking that mobile-first design requires.
Thanks for sharing! It’s great to have some expert opinions.
James Cooper says
Really interesting as I made my Church site go responsive last week!!! http://www.minehead-baptist.com/ I’m using the ‘adapt’ bit of js, rather than @media queries.
I’m not fully sold on ‘mobile first’ yet but ‘mobile very important’ is certainly up there!
And really lovely site Brian!
Brian Notess says
Looks good James, and it’s literally the first responsive church site I’ve seen.
Like I told Brian, I don’t think mobile-first is a necessary reality, but I like the way it forces designers to think. Of course, I’m not a designer so that’s probably why 🙂 Responsive design usually makes the developer’s job easier.
Ron Gehrke says
I am also about to launch a new church site within the next two weeks based off of the Skeleton framework (http://www.getskeleton.com). I also evaluated cssgrid.net as well as columnal as options for my framework. I ultimately chose Skeleton because I was able to use 960.gs templates to design it. The fluidity produced by columnal and the 1140 css grid also made it difficult to design a fixed layout like I was accustomed to.
Brian Notess says
Cool, Ron. I hadn’t seen Skeleton before. I actually may use it in a project I’m working on. No doubt, it takes some getting used to.
Thanks for sharing.
James Cooper says
Cool Ron! On my Church site (see above) I used: http://adapt.960.gs/ which is made by Nathan Smith, who also invented the great 960.gs, which my church site also uses. It’s worth a look!
Ron Gehrke says
Thanks. I have been using 960.gs for a while now and it might be nice to keep with that.
Are you using anything for image resizing? My new design still uses an image slider as the main design feature and I will likely use a lot of other large images. Columnal and CSSgrid had image resizing built in, but I also think that is what made it difficult for me to get the precision that the traditional 960gs gives me.
You can see a development preview of my site at http://new.lfchurch.com.
Nick Kastner says
This is really nice. I’m going to share it with my team here at Red Clay as well.
Nick Kastner says
Regarding responsive websites, we worked with Riverbend Baptist church and developed their new site (http://www.rbbc.net) which is cross-platform/device compatible. There is a high number of iPhone users that visit this site and because of that, we developed everything to be mobile and tablet friendly. This site received a 2010 Communicators Award of Excellence in the religion category about two months ago. You should check it out.
Nick Kastner
Interactive Marketing Director
Red Clay Interactive
Brian Notess says
Nice work!
When I went to the rbbc site on my iPhone, I saw what appeared to be the desktop version.
Great design work, though.
Nick Kastner says
It is. But we tried to design everything large enough so there were no small links to click. it’s not responsive design but it is cross platform compatible.
Jon Shirley says
Check out my church’s forthcoming website. http://beta.gatheringnetwork.com/
Interesting things to point out. Absolutely no bells and whistles.
The “Latest” post on the front page – as well as each Missional Community Page (storytellers is the only live one today) – each are automatically updated via email as the entire church (or each missional community) is sent an email weekly – keeping all the content fresh – up to the minute (along with twitter feeds).
The whole site can be updated via a master administrator, while each missional community page is updated with emails that the MC admin sends.
There are two steps of communication. The admins log into our church wide data base management system (CCB, Church Community Builder) to send one email to the group they administrate. The email goes to the users, and posts to their page on the church’s site so visitors can view it. Admins then go to Tweetdeck and send a tweet to their MC, which will also post to the groups Facebook page.
This all creates a very large, albeit VERY simple, immediate bandwidth of communication.
Brian Notess says
This is a really interesting approach, Jon.
What are you using to post via email? CCB looks pretty comprehensive. I’d be interested to hear about your experience using it.
Thanks for sharing!
Jon Shirley says
Yeah, CCB is pretty comprehensive – it would be similar to Zondervans data base management system (the City, I believe, not sure).
We use CCB: 1. Because it allows our church to decentralize giving, making us less dependent on gatherings for tithing, therefore we can be more flexible with missional stuff. 2. Each person is responsible to keep their contact info and profile current. That no longer depends on the admins. 3. Groups can be contacted by a master admin for high level communication.
As for the updates, any email service that allows group lists would suffice. Simply add the blog email address to the group and the blog will recieve any news the group gets.
This entire format has become a solution to use our website as a hub for missional communities in our network – giving them freedom to lead creatively, while giving them tools that help them to give their time to mission, not admin stuff.
Peter Thorpe says
Good thoughts. http://jeremyelder.com/ just built our church (http://sovgracemn.org) a responsive website using http://themble.com/bones/ The biggest reason our church didn’t hire one of the larger church-specific CMS companies is the lack of hardly any mobile plan.