Resume and professional information

Web Design - Valley Church

The Web site that Valley Church had when my wife and I moved to the Bay Area was... well, let's just say that my wife and I visited Valley in spite of the Web site, not because of it.

Once I was asked to help out with their site, several things happened. The most important was that we changed the site's information architecture to more accurately reflect the uses that actual visitors would find useful. This meant organizing things by demographic (potential visitor, attendee, family with children). However, one other thing that happened is that my original design draft, which was intended to highlight information changes rather than address aesthetic issues, was (unfortunately) accepted without revision. This lead to a design revision soon after the update that focused solely on looks and rendered the home page into something I abhorred -- an "image map"-type page.

This page had neither useful information (a no-no for a Web site front page) nor a pleasing color scheme.

Luckily, I was able to correct this problem by introducing a new color scheme and making the home page into something that presented a good amount of relevant, up-to-date information at a glance.

Furthermore, I was able to introduce DHTML menus to the site, providing navigation to important sub pages directly from the home page and eliminating the multi-step navigation introduced in the second reorganization.

Overall, the site worked well in this format and it was left in this state for several years before we decided to switch to a CVS system to move the responsibility for page updates from the Web team to the better-informed office staff.