Church website redesign for critique

Joined: 12/04/2008

Here's a church website redesign I've been working on. I don't have all the info fleshed out, but the basic look and navigation are there. What do you think?

Current site: http://www.htbc.info
Test redesign site: http://htbc.ericepps.org

Joined: 12/16/2007
One suggestion

Pretty neat design. Maybe spend a little more time looking at typography and the "pretty" factor of your text. It's readable now, which is most important, but it could be better.

Also, I would take the picture of the church off and photoshop it up as a background in the header.

Blessings,
Tony

G&G Podcast Host
Matt Farina's picture
Joined: 06/01/2006
A couple Thoughts

Looks good overall. I do have a few thoughts....

First, the white space seems to be off on the homepage. I think there needs to be more space above the map. Also, think of the page as a grid. Stuff should snap to that grid. All of the things in your left region/sidebar should line up on the same grid line. The same thing goes for your content on the right. This is important for the way eyes track through a page.

Second, You events calendar isn't there and the events listing you have doesn't read well. You might want to spruce it up.

Those are my two biggies.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Former Co-Host
www.mattfarina.com

FD
FD's picture
Joined: 01/30/2009
first: i like the green tidy

first: i like the green tidy when i started looling at your site..and i like the strict.
.. - some minor warnings pop up at ministries and media (but easy to fix) and some links link back to the old page (but i guess this is only because its beta).

One for the technique: Its fluid and on the welcome page the fluent layout shrinks a little bit too much (something like 650 or so - 800 will be small enough)
..one second one.. because i saw it on the fly - you don't need to add extra markup for clearing (p tag) - use the next element.

One logical thing i miss: i can't see where i am on the site - there is no breadcrumb navi (ok - this would be too much for this site) - but i would love to see some active status in navigation bar.

..And one for the content: - Its only beta.. so maybe this is coming later on - but i miss some (nice) pictures. Especially for a community it would give the site much more live.