If you haven’t noticed, the North Point home page just got a major redesign. This comes a little over a year since the last redesign. That redesign was a huge improvement in the look of the site. This time around we were focused on the user-interface and layout of information on the site.
We started with the current design and built off of it. If you’ve got a good looking site, don’t feel the need to drastically change it every time you do an upgrade. This allows you to fix the problems you know about as opposed to creating a whole new set of problems.
In the old design, it took on average 3-5 clicks to find what you were looking for. In our redesign, we wanted to bring that down to 1-2 clicks. We did this by adding a “Quick Links” drop down to the top of ever page of the site. Once clicked, a site index drops down from the top and gives you easy access to everything on the site. That’s two clicks to get to anything on our site. Huge improvement.
Another goal was to prominently feature four main options on the home page. They are:
- New To North Point - A new area of the site with videos that show someone who’s never been exactly what to expect on their first visit to North Point.
- Get Involved - We wanted to use the site to encourage regular attenders to take that next step into community group or strategic service.
- Messages - Our most popular area of the site!
- Invite a Friend - One goal was to give our regular attenders an easy way to invite their friends.
Lastly, we wanted to give some home page real estate to our biggest ministry areas. The content area at the bottom of the page has environment descriptions and upcoming events for our married adults, single adults, students, and kids ministries. We decided to make the menu roll-over triggered so getting to this information doesn’t even require a click!
Overall we’re really happy with the redesign and are anxious to start getting feedback. The great thing about websites is that they’re never really done. We’re always working to make them better, so please, leave a comment and tell us what you think!
June 11th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
The site is awesome. I love the four main options on the home page.
For me, the “Invite a Friend” link and process alone is worth the change. I would love to incorporate this into our (soon to be revised)website. Did you need any special software or addins to process this?
BTW, I sent an invite to three different email address to test it. In Outlook it came through pretty clean. On my Palm TX, the graphics did not come through at all–just my sentence that I added to personalize it.
June 14th, 2009 at 10:24 am
Thanks for the feedback Kevin. The “Invite a Friend” form uses a custom java servlet to process the form submission. We use that for all of our web forms throughout all of our sites. However, you should be able to find some code to do the same thing. It’s not that uncommon.
We’re actually working on an updated “Invite a Friend” page that will fix some of the issues you pointed out.
February 3rd, 2011 at 2:36 pm
I love your Quick Links drop down menu on the main Northpoint.org page. Is this a wordpress widget or something custom you designed yourselves? I would like to find out more. By the way, your site looks amazing and I love the functionality.
March 7th, 2011 at 6:57 pm
Thanks, Sam. The Quick Links functionality uses a custom modification of the Kwicks jQuery widget. When we were designing that functionality a couple of years ago, there weren’t many sites doing that sort of thing. Now it’s fairly common, so I would be surprised if there wasn’t a wordpress plugin that does the same thing.
July 17th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
I just have a question about the websites of your other churches that are using wordpress like Watermarke. How did you create the navigation bars with the double dropdown, is that a plugin or just code and css? Is there anyway you would be able to share that information \ code.. Any help would be much appreciated….
Thanks,
Brian