For over a year I have been working on a redesign of my local parish website, Holy Trinity Catholic Church. I have put in some heavy time here and there, but nothing consistent. We are building a blog style site founded on the Drupal CMS with tag categories for Church bulletin, religious education, news flashes, some ad hoc material and static content for things like maps, parish committees, school events, etc…

Lately, I felt like there was an expectation in the parish community that the redesign was overdue or worse abandoned. Mostly this stemmed from me being a poor steward to the parish in keeping key players(e.g., pastor) appraised of my progress or lack there of. This post and subsequent ones will serve as guides to the redesign progress and expected time frame for completion. Sort of a loose project plan meets designer ramblings.

Initial phases of the project revolved around getting the technical lay of the land for the current website both machine and personal wise. Then some time was spent accessing different CMSs and trying to select the best fit for Holy Trinity. During the Spring Dennis Mohr and I built 10-13 various layouts to get the mental juices flowing – more on that later. About six months ago, just before summer, I set up Drupal on a local test windows machine. I put some dummy data in the data model and set up a three column layout with the default Drupal garland theme. This taught me a lot about the ins and outs of Drupal and how to work with template files, GUI, and the document root files to affect changes. Nothing spectacular, but a start.

Summer turned out not to be a productive time for working on the redesign. Near the end of the summer I made a big effort in August to get a working custom theme ported to Drupal based on one of the Adobe Illustrator designs Dennis Mohr and I worked on in early Spring. Dennis and I both wanted a keen looking theme, but I was constantly hamstringing him with my conception of the design from a system architects view point (i.e., I am much more of an “engineer” then a designer/artist). Dennis, being an artist at heart, was shackled by me and in the end our final theme effort came to life looking like some sort of web Frankenstein.

In September I realized the website will never get done right unless I trust the artist. Even as I write this Dennis is probably in Paris cavorting with fellow artiste and chuckling at the demise of the engineer who dared approach web design. All joking aside I am certain some unconstrained input in this arena will secure the objective of designing and deploying a winning web site (note: defining a web winner is a subject more akin to a book then a wee little post – let’s leave that as a post release topic). In the meantime I have busied myself with modifications to a new Drupal theme, atck, which will serve as our CSS foundation. Atck theme is based on Yahoo UI and once you get familiar with the basics is a very flexible layout engine. With atck as a base theme we can rapidly port new design ideas to Drupal.

Speaking of layouts does anyone notice a trend in the last two screen shots? Three column layouts for both. Initially, I was convinced that given the various types of content (i.e., mix of static and posts), menus, and potential ad placements that three columns was a no brainer. However, the more I study Web 2.0 and social sites in general I am starting to lean towards two column layout. My biggest gripe with three column layout, or for that matter anything more then two columns, is you need a boat load of content to ensure you don’t end up with distracting amounts of white space. Multi column layouts make sense for big content sites like Catholic Online and Ignatius Press. On the flip side sites like NYPriests, SQPN, and Whispers in the Loggia are light to medium weight two column content sites.

There are a whole host of other problems with three column layouts for a site as content skinny as Holy Trinity, but two more jump to mind right away – secondary menu consistency and content width constraints for media. By secondary menus I mean anything that is not the primary menu. Look at either of the above screen shots and you can see menus placed in either the left or right columns with a content column running the middle of the page. This leaves the user with a lot of real estate to cross if they need to access an item that is in the left column, but they are currently perusing the right. Second, because we have a right and a left column the content column, center column, is fairly narrow. The narrowness of the content column will prevent it from being used adequately if we want to use media spots (e.g., YouTube content or web sized photos). Sure you could put a YouTube spot in there, but it would look squeezed and out of place. More white space is needed for clean separation.

There is a lot more to talk about, but limited time. Suffice to say Dennis and I will be hashing these issues out in the immediate future. For the time being Dennis and I will try to meet in the next two weeks to get a final decision on the two vs. three column layout and discuss his design ideas. Thanks be to God Dennis is on board … the project will be all the better for it! Once we get a final decision on layout and tinker the menus some more we can set up the test site for the Holy Trinity staff to input data (e.g., About page, School pages, Church pages, etc.). Our goal is to get that ball rolling before Christmas. By late winter we hope to have a design finalized that can then be ported to the generic model the staff has imputed data to.