Just launched the new web site for McLean Presbyterian Church. It’s got a pretty simple look and feel, which I think is really one of the hallmarks of great web design: presenting just enough information, without being overly “pushy”. It’s so easy these days to want to just keep adding all sorts of features, widgets, and other random stuff that the web site eventually just degenerates into a gigantic glob of blah. The best example of this feature creep phenomena I can remember is the old ICQ homepage. It’s like someone forgot where the delete key was. Just remember, every time something gets added, something is taken away.

Anyways, we did a couple neat “behind-the-scenes” things with this site, most noteable of which is that the entire site is powered by WordPress. By default, WordPress is geared more towards a blog (like this site), so there were a couple of customizations and tweaks I had to make in order to get the site to where it is now (I’ll post more later), but on the whole… WordPress worked great for this project. I’m hoping to be able to have enough time to release all the different customizations we did back into the WordPress community, since I am a big believer in Open Source.

Another note about the site, the menu animation is done with the super duper Script.aculo.us library, which I mentioned 2 posts back. Seriously, if you’re doing any sort of web stuff, Script.aculo.us is gonna make your life a whole lot easier.

PS, we also launched MannaWalk this week, but I didn’t really work on that site.