This is the most extensive site I've done other than my personal web site, and I've completed four remakes of the site over a number of years, three of which are shown here. The most recent layout is shown at the top. It goes to show how much web design has improved in a short amount of time! (And it's embarrassing to think I was actually proud of that first design!)

The last two redesigns of the Church of the Cross site took over 6 months each to complete, but of course not all that time was spent working on it. There was a lot of lag time as people consulted and convened to make decisions about the direction and content of the site. Probably one of the hardest sites to make is a site that involves input from a lot of people. BUT...we did it! The next unveiling of the brand new site does not have a release date yet.

This current site has flash animation on the home page and on the youth pages. It has java script drop down menus for navigation and an off-site search engine. The site is 63 pages in length and growing! Each page has two custom graphics in the heading: the words on the left hand side of the page and the photo on the right hand side of the page. All of the photographs were taken by church members and have been cut-out, bordered, and/or enhanced by me. The clipart found on many pages under the heading comes from a church clipart website that the church subscribes to. The most time-consuming aspect of this site was the preparation of so many graphics and locating the right clipart. The site also has multiple submission forms for volunteers.

The new site will contain most of the same components, however the pages will be constructed to avoid having to make frequent changes. As the site is immense in size, it becomes labor intensive to update so many pages regularly, so they have been written to be more generic, referring to the monthly newsletter for current events.

The site is hosted independently by local web hosting company. Because we are independently hosted we do not have the full-feature add-ons that are available from companies who specialize in web hosting. I work pro bono on the church websites.

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