First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue
While employed as the Communications Director at First Presbyterian Church of Bellevue, WA, I was tasked with creating a new website for the church. It wasn’t until I began the process that I learned (the hard way) that nearly every single one of the 3,000+ members of the church felt that it was their God-given duty to let me know exactly what they wanted the website to be and do.
And, of course, very few of each of those 3,000 “visions” meshed nicely with the other 2,999. Perfect.
The end result was a 16 month process involving more “information sessions” than I care to remember, teams of volunteer designers and developers, one temp flown down from Edmonton for a week, and my liver threatening to commit hara-kiri if I forced one more glass of scotch through it. However, at the end of it all, we had a gorgeous shiny website including such things as automated giving sign-up, dynamic calendars, and a Movable Type-based site-wide CMS that allowed department heads to assign their own content managers, thus removing the bottleneck of update requests stacked up in my recycling bin.
- Role: Executive Producer
- Technologies used: XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Movable Type, Photoshop CS2, Flash
- Duties:
- Led an in-house team of full-time, part-time, and volunteer designers/developers/writers throughout the entire process.
- Hired contractors in various disciplines to assist with the design/development process
- Developed technology plans - the previous site was built in ASP.NET and was basically hosted in someone's living room. I developed a new plan for all site technology and hosting parameters.
- Information gathering and site mapping
- Laid out timelines and budgets
- Majority of XHTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP/MySQL development
- Trained other church staff and volunteers to use the freshly-implemented CMS, sermon upload tool, and analytics/tracking software.