Swindoll's Church's Website
Category: Design...
Posted Tuesday, July 24, 2007 at 10:39 PM [GMT-6]

The church where Chuck Swindoll pastors – Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco – has a new website design, courtesy of Dallas freelancer Chris Merritt. Merritt's account of how he created the new design is found in the current Digital Web Magazine's The Working Designer column.

I'm always interested in learning the details of the processes used by other designers, and my situation closely resembles that of Merritt's (for example, my commute is measured in feet, not miles or hours), with a few minor exceptions:

• I've never been paid to submit proposals for a design project.
• I've never had the unimaginable luxury of collaborating with a web developer who says, "Just design it how you want to design it, and I’ll worry about how to make it work." (OK, he does do development work; it just wasn't required for this project.)
• I've never had a high profile project that required "two-to-three months" just to come up with the design, never mind the coding of such.

Merritt seems like a really nice guy, and his design skills are obvious and formidable. In a former life, he says he was a church planter and worship leader, and thus has a special affinity for church and ministry-related websites.

The Stonebriar site mentioned at the top of this post is indeed beautifully done. Church websites are among the most complicated of designs, due to the potential diversity of the organization's "clients," and it's almost impossible to make one user-friendly while also providing comprehensive information for the wide variety of users. Merritt's design is a good example of how that line can be successfully navigated.