Things I Like :: Crossroads Baptist Church Website

A screen shot of our new Website @ Crossroads.  Visit it at http://crossroadsbcfamily.org

If you know me, or if you read this post, you know that I like to design and make things.  One of the things that I am in charge of at Crossroads is our website.  When I got to Crossroads, our website was pretty crazy.  It was built on Joomla which is an open source CMS (Content Management System).  Its a good platform, but our site looked like Frankenstein built it.  It had hundreds of pages with lots of menus EVERYWHERE.  Thank goodness I don't have a picture of what it looked like.

About a year and a half ago, I really decided to change the direction of the site totally.  I had tried to work with Joomla, using a template I bought, but it was still pretty rough.  In my search, I stumbled across some great website ideas that were built on the Wordpress blogging platform.  Although wordpress was intended for blogging, many businesses and churches use it for their main websites.  I got our site up and running, and it looked like the image on the right.  It was neat, and clean.  I really started to get into the site, setting up plugins for various stuff, but I soon found out the shortfall of most templates.  You are limited to what is there.  If I want to add another column, I can't...at least not without some pretty serious programming knowledge.  The featured content slider (pictures on main page) was also a pre-programmed thing that conflicted with many new plugins (features) that I wanted to add.  When I'd try to add something new, it often killed the page for people using Internet Explorer.



So, I want to say that I DID NOT write or program this design.  It was a template.  But I did take it and transform it to a sweetly functioning site.  Its not 100% finished...probably more like 85% finished.  But, besides getting it all set up and designing the content slider (pictures) on the main screen, here's a few of the touches I added:

Header Logo:

Headers for Individual pages (just a few examples):

And, I added 2 faceboook "Like-Boxes" to our site.  If you navigate anywhere out of the main page, the info in the right hand column gets replaced by a box for members to "Like" our Crossroads facebook group, as well as see the upcoming events.  I also added a specific ReFuel box to the Refuel page

All in all, I'm pretty excited about it.  I know I need to add a little more content (or, rather get the leaders of the different ministries to write something for me).  Let me know what you think!