Celebration Community Church of North Brevard

Very recently I've joined a local church in the north brevard
area, and because I have some web design knowledge and
because my mom nudged me into doing it, I am designing
our church's websites.

This looks okay, but was done in Microsoft Publisher,
and weighs in at about 150kb for the index alone... which
led me to do the website in FrontPage... for my Pastor
who wants to work the website in a WYSIWYG editor...
(in case, for some reason, I am unable or leave the church
on a mission trip or for whatever reason)

Critique on Original... http://www.cccnb.com/(~150KB)

New Design In Progress
(before I present to my Pastor)
My New Design... (~6KB)

Like I said, critiques are welcome...

some comparing and contrasting of the two would be great.

Hi,,

First I would start to pick out some color scheme.. Go to the church look around. Maybe its a color scheme in the building or something that you can use on the page.

Try to put in familiar element for graphics. Like a unique church roof or something that the people in church think are special for just this church. <-- Could also be a saying that the priest use. Try atleast to get in a more graphical layout that will say something about the church.

The loose the text effect. That effect you are currently using look "sorry" kinda cheap and amature.

I like the blue > before the content. Thats nice ,, you could keep that if it fits into a new design. Try also to make the content to be the biggest element on your page. They come read, so center it!. Also try to get in some pictures of the church and the people important to the church. Maybe do a section on the visitors.

The map. Try to make illustrations of the landmarks. Not only tekst. Make it look really nice.

I wish you good luck on this page. Have fun!

thanks for post..

It's really hard to pick a theme color because right now we
are renting out a local elementary school, and may not
stay there forever.. depends on how fast the church grows.

I thought about the links graphics looking a bit cheasy as
well, but IMO they look better than the Publisher links
on the link provided in post1.

As it goes for the images of the church, people, etc
this sunday after church my pastor and I are going to
add pictures of previous services, and sermons, more
pages ... etc

thanks for the good luck..


any other suggestions?

[EDIT]
Made a new image to highlight the mouseover of a link
in the navigation... what do you think?
(It saves much loading of images... )

I agree you need more graphical impact. You could have a picture of the pastor in action, another of the band with people listening, singing, worshiping. Wash out the background to white/transparent (so they don't look square) and place beside the appropriate text. (img - text | next area text - img | etc).

I'm not a fan of using graphics in place of text, but those do look nice-you should preload the rollover image, (just use a hidden div at the end of the page) or combine the two and use css to reposition the image to show the rollover image.

WYSIWIG editors always seem to want to slip tables into the mix, don't they? I'd go for an all-css layout, but your editor may not have that option.

Overall the initial viewing gives a pleasant effect, but there's no impact, no curiousity that would lead me to read on. It's a good start, let us know how it progresses.

all critiques so far have been taken into consideration.

about WYSIWYG editor...
Not sure if I said it before, but I transfered to FrontPage
from Publisher, which was a definite improvement.
(My pastor doesn't know anything about web design...)


will post new thread in a few days, maybe aweek, for a
re-critique of the page with more content (pages,images)

to all -- good day, weekend ...

OMFG thats a hella long source code, the first thing you defineatly need to do is learn HTML, tables or no tables learn html ASAP. Dreamweaver is a good way to start.

YIKES,, two bad words in one sentence, he said ("FrontPage and Publisher"),, You should really move away from that tools!!,, They make your code really REALLY long and its will the browsers MORE time to load and they are not cross-browser friendly!

Again good luck!