Mission Valley Christian Fellowship is a large church located in the heart of San Diego. They had an internal Web designer that had built up several different sites, and recently left the organization. Near the end of 2002, we helped them with a remodel of their highly visible, www.americablessgod.com site. This site was then promoted around San Diego on thousands of bumper stickers, in newspapers, on bus terminals, billboards, and even in Qualcomm stadium through the Padres and Chargers seasons and the Super Bowl.

The response from that site brought us to remodel the church’s main site as well. This process faced many challenges. The site was very large (over 3,400 pages, 11,000 files, and 150MB), no one knew much about the existing site, and they wanted to have the ability for several different volunteers to edit the site internally.

The site also needed to cater to a wide variety of people: regular attendees, visitors, potential visitors, national radio listeners, among many others. The site needed to be sharp and easily navigable.

We built their site accommodating the depth of their needed navigation. The site gives a wide variety of options to where a user might want to go to view different aspects of the church, different areas for research, daily devotions, large photo gallery, and an extensive message archive.

The site incorporates a wide use of include files and cascading style sheets that allow the look and feel to cover the entire site, and make global updates quick and easy. This was critical to build the site with this functionality because of the sheer quantity of files.

We chose to use Macromedia’s new product, Contribute, to set permissions for different users to update the site. This is a product we are still learning, but very impressed with so far. It allows a user, unfamiliar with Web development and html, the ability to make content changes to the pages they have been given the permission to edit. For a wide base of volunteer staff that will be making the changes, we saw this as a perfect fit.

Click here to visit the site.