Ok, so this was a bit of a ridiculous week for me.

Back a few months ago, one of my co-workers and I decided that Frontline, our ministry for Young Adults needed a new website.

Actually, let me back up even farther. Way back in May, Frontline Silver Spring needed a website. And they needed it quick, fast and in a hurry. Without the money to go outside, I build a serviceable website on WordPress (actually, it was WordPress MU because I was young and naive) using a pretty good template. I had some help from the awesome graphic designers on my previous team in creating some graphics, and then from there started learning WordPress and web design in general. Before that, I pretty much knew how to make text bold or link something with HTML, and that was about it. I’ve learned a ton since then, and I’m still trying to teach myself new stuff.

Back then I thought that site was pretty sweet. Looking at it now, I don’t think it’s all that great

Fast forward again to a few months ago. Frontline was getting ready to launch a new campus, and we needed a website. We decided that this would be the perfect time for a complete overhaul. Since we now had four physical campuses and an Internet Campus we decided we wanted a central site that connected all of the cross-campus information, and then we would need campus sites to show what was happening at each individual campus, as well as house campus specific information.

For our new central site (www.FrontlineDC.com, we went with our friends over at SiteOrganic, who did a great job designing the McLean Bible Church sites this past summer. We pretty much went with the same design (we are the same church, after all) with some different design elements. They were a huge help, especially in integrating the Internet Campus throughout the six websites. Big thanks! Probably some of the nicest people around too.

Having learned from some of our mistakes in the past we set about creating a site that was simple to navigate. To me as a communications major I am always looking to communicate as clearly as possible and with as little confusion as possible.

Now comes the fun part. The campus sites were all going to be WordPress. Designed by me. Coded by me. This was probably the biggest undertaking I had attempted yet. In fact, I went into it not really knowing how the heck I was going to pull it off. But luckily my google-fu is strong, and I was able to figure out enough CSS to put these wonderful sites together.

www.frontlinetysons.com
www.frontlinearlington.com
www.frontlineprincewilliam.com
www.frontlinesilverspring.com
www.frontlinelive.com

Check em out, let me know what you think. The goal was simplicity. Really we didn’t need the campus sites to be everything to everybody. We needed them to tell people:

a. About the campus.
b. What was going on at the campus.

…and that’s pretty much it.

Anyhow, let me know what you think of the sites.