The Real Reason We Redesigned ChurchMag

Last month we launched ChurchMag 3.0.

We’ve talked a little bit about some of the behind the scenes on the ChurchMag Podcast and I’ve already talked about the great social sharing plugin we’re now using, but there’s one thing I haven’t fully touched on that I thought I would share with you and a question I’ve been asked a few times since launch:

Why did you redesign ChurchMag?

Some of the Reasons

Unless you frequent ChurchMag a lot, you may not have noticed anything too drastic. The truth of the matter is that we didn’t really dislike what we had. If anything, the redesign was more of a visual refresh.

The changes are altogether subtle on the surface level. In fact, someone tweeted me last week asking if we had redesigned the site yet! LOL

We wanted to accommodate for our new logo design we released at the start of the year, which required some font choices to change. We wanted to make our search engine better. We also wanted to make more space for things like the ChurchMag Podcast.

Finally, we wanted to make things more cohesive with ChurchMag Press.

See what we did there?

As you click through both sites, I’m sure you’ll find the similarities in their design.

But despite these handful of reasons, this isn’t fundamentally why we made the change.

The Real Reason We Redesigned ChurchMag

As much as I love our new look and having everything becoming closer to our center point of vision, the aforementioned were not the underlying reasons. It’s more like icing on the cake.

As painful as it is for a tech blog to admit this, the number one reason why we redesigned ChurchMag is because our theme was broken.

Yup. That’s right. We were sailing the high-seas of the Internet with a broken ship.

You see, our customized child theme prevented us from updating Genesis, our website framework. And we’re not talking about “cool new features” kind of updates, but “your website has a security risk” kind of updates.

YIKES!

So while we enjoy the cleaner look, improved UI and search engine, it’s the ability to keep everything updated and having cleaner code that’s what this whole “redesign” thing was all about.

Any questions?

I’d be happy to answer any. ?

Eric Dye

Support Lead at Valet, and Proprietor of DYECASTING. Human by day, gamer at night, lover of coffee, and all things spicy.