30 April 2008

Changes to gccwired.com often occur in one of four ways: 1) Complete site redesign 2) Scoped projects completed by our web development team (aspireone.com) 3) Small upgrades to basic functionality (aspireone.com) and 4) Small tweaks to pages made by our team (staff/volunteers).

At any given time we may be working in each of these four areas. But these two are both in-house tweaks rolled out to take specific pages or functionality to the next level.

Upgrades
The first is the weekend experience page (and midweek experience page). Both pages had some issues that we put up with for a while (old looking icons, cluttered with graphics and hidden links to podcast subscription page).

Boil things down to the lowest common denominator, create some new icons with on and off states and make the link to podcast obvious at the top. Whole new experience...

The second is a way to update contact information online. We had a general contact form with 'update contact information' as a choice in a drop menu. But this was hidden and difficult for people to use.

This new page is a direct link off the My Account page. The entire form is structured for one purpose - to allow people to update their information - everything from address, to phone number, to email address to changes in their household (death, marriage, divorce, etc.).

We currently use FellowshipOne as our church management system, but this form does NOT tie into that database. Due to the importance of the address when it comes to contributions and statements - these forms are manually processed by someone on staff so previous addresses can be kept on file as well as the new one being entered.

Two fairly small projects, but both help fix a problem or make the user experience better - that's large in my book.