• Rhino
  • codeslinger
  • Offline
  • From: Los Angeles
  • Registered: 2006-12-27

Topic: Faith Celebration Fellowship - v3.0

Hey everybody -

Recently a small dev team at my church, Faith Celebration Fellowship in North Hollywood CA, designed and launched the newest version of our church website:

http://www.fcflife.com/

The site is built on Wordpress v2.7 and a couple plugins. We have features such as discussion forums,  an events calendars, Pastor's Devos, recent sermons in audio format, and a bunch of pictures and videos of things that are happening in the Church.

I would like to request some feedback on the design, functionality, content, or anything else on fcflife.com that is done well or poorly. We are revising the site constantly to make it better so all your opinions would be greatly appreciated, because we haven't really built a church site before and by the grace of God we are kind of just making this up as we go along smile

thanks for your support.
-Rhino

Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.   -Rep. Morris Udall

Rhino's Website

  • C.Barr
  • Interface Developer/Designer
  • Offline
  • From: Pensacola, FL
  • Registered: 2006-12-05

Re: Faith Celebration Fellowship - v3.0

Really like the design overall, very new and modern feeling.  I wouldn't change anything design wise.

I'm really liking the way the photo galleries are presented.  It's like a super-lightbox. It doesn't take you to some other page, but it's a temporary full screen photo viewer.  Very nice!

I do get a bit of widget overload though.  I see the image slider at the top, the music player, the calendar, archives, and a live chat.  It all feels like a bit too much. 

I also see some html errors - it looks like a lot, but I think it's all just from some single tag that's been left open and it just cascades the errors down.

http://chris-barr.com | http://twitter.com/chrismbarr

C.Barr's Website

  • Rhino
  • codeslinger
  • Offline
  • From: Los Angeles
  • Registered: 2006-12-27

Re: Faith Celebration Fellowship - v3.0

hey thanks Chris - long time no see smile

anyway, I agree that there is a lot of stuff going on on the homepage. we are working on that today to make it a little less busy. we took the chatroll off the home page and put it back on the discussions page and hopefully we can clean some other stuff up as well. Also - we are going to use Transitional instead of Strict, not sure where that came from but thanks for catching it, we will get those validation errors cleaned up.

Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.   -Rep. Morris Udall

Rhino's Website

  • dmarino
  • Designer/Developer
  • Offline
  • From: Southern New Hampshire
  • Registered: 2007-05-23

Re: Faith Celebration Fellowship - v3.0

Looks good - I agree with Chris, don't think I would change anything design-wise.

However it took a loooong time for me to even see anything on the page (290K on the home page). You've got a ton of external CSS and JS files - I would combine some of those to reduce lookup queries. It also looks like you're loading jQuery twice and you're also using Prototype/Scriptaculous. Why not just use one JS library? And if you decide to go with jQuery - why not load that from google like Prototype is (looks like it's being served locally)?

Daniel Marino | www.iamdanielmarino.com

dmarino's Website

  • Rhino
  • codeslinger
  • Offline
  • From: Los Angeles
  • Registered: 2006-12-27

Re: Faith Celebration Fellowship - v3.0

yea man its definitely too heavy. that's part of both the gift and the curse of using WP plugins - just about every one is built to be used on it's own, and many of them use various js libraries. So often when you install mutiple plugins they each add their own includes which all add up to be the monstrosity that it currently is. I need to work on optimizing all of those external includes - thanks for pointing that out.

- Rhino

Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.   -Rep. Morris Udall

Rhino's Website