‘Get in the Picture’ is a project organised by the Baptist Union of Great Britain. It is a way of engaging with people about the story of Christmas by inviting them to dress up as characters from the nativity scene and then log on to the website to find their photos.

They approached me in the summer of 2012 to help them with a fundamental redesign of their website. The goals were to improve ease of use for churches, to provide an increase in visitor numbers and to put the project on a strong footing for future years’ development.

I completely re-wrote the database and control panel from scratch on a custom made database. The graphics are fun and designed to engaged people who are visiting the website. People looking for their photos can share the images on Facebook with friends, therefore increasing the visitor numbers to the website.

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‘Today…not Tomorrow’ is an inter-generational ministry that aims to disciple children and young people in a way which is integrated into the context of the wider church. It is a project from the Baptist Union of Great Britain and Arise Ministries, and aims to celebrate the gifting and faith of young people.

Working within the existing branding (which included imagery, logo and colour schemes), I came up with a web design which would be easy for the Today…not Tomorrow team to update and maintain. The website focusses around a WordPress backend, and has many different custom post types in order to build the databanks of downloadable resources.

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Beckenham Baptist Church is a member church of the Baptist Union of Great Britain. They approached me in the Summer of 2012 looking for a new website to replace their old one. The task was to design a website around the existing branding (primarily a logo and a colour scheme) that was attractive to visitors and that showed off the church to its best.

The website looks simple from the front, but it is heavily modified on the back end to allow it to serve different files to different users (depending on their permissions) and to manage podcasts and other media. The website is also integrated with Google Calendar, allowing for easy synchronisation of data.

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Herzwerk (in English: Heart Factory) is a Vienna-based charity which was set up to work to women who have been trafficked or who are stuck in prostitution. Herzwerk’s mandate is rooted in the Christian view of the individual: every person, regardless of his or her place of birth, nationality, job, sexual lifestyle or religion, is loved and valued by God. Their worth is untouchable.

The key design criteria for the website was that it should raise awareness of the work of the charity without becoming part of a meaningless culture of pity. Therefore, it was important not to use manipulative design in order to get a specific emotional reaction from the audience.

The website was also interesting to work on because it relies on a WordPress backend (which allows for content to be continually updated by Herzwerk’s staff workers) whilst at the same time also providing translations in German (the primary language of the website) and English. This translation facility was crucial and needed to be easy to use.

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The Scottish Baptist College is a small Bible college based on the outskirts of Glasgow. Affiliated with the University of the West of Scotland and the Baptist Union of Scotland, it provides vocational training for students feeling called to a variety of Christian vocations, including full-time ministry and youth ministry.

They approached me to design their new website in the Spring of 2012 to coincide with a new range of courses. The website fulfils the dual roles of providing information about the courses for prospective students, and keeping alumni up-to-date with college news. It was important that it should be attractive and easy-to-use. Because the website conveys a lot of information, a focus on typographical presentation was important to prevent boredom or fatigue on the part of the reader.

The website has a custom-built backend to allow the college to advertise events and news. This custom solution was chosen because it would give the college the freedom to independently update these areas of the website without feeling overwhelmed by information.

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The Big Welcome, “there’s a space for you” is a simple church facing campaign to encourage Christians to invite someone they know to something they love. This free church initiative, organised by Elim, The Methodist Church and the Baptist Union. It is about making people feel really welcome in any church activity.

The goal of the website, originally designed for Spring 2012, was to act as a store front for churches who are registering to take part in The Big Welcome, allowing them to buy resources, posters and other publicity materials. These resources were available in English and Welsh.

The website had to be easy to use, as people buying might not be everyday online shoppers. Therefore it had to curate an experience of trust and to make people feel they were able to buy securely online. It also had to be easy to find the correct resource amongst hundreds of different options.

Edit Spring 2013: this is the second year of being involved in the website design. It has received a facelift and re-brand for the new Big Welcome theme. There are also new sections to streamline the process of downloading files for logged in users. I am very excited to be involved in this project a second time.

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The Kingdom Vineyard church in St Andrews was planted 7 years ago and aims to ‘help people make connections with God’. It serves not only the busy student town of St Andrews but the wider East Neuk area of Fife.

The re-designed website was an important step in the continued expansion of the church and built upon the already strong content strategy and WordPress backend. I was largely involved in the design of the website, whilst my good friend Jesse Duley coded up a lot of the design into WordPress’ backend.

I was also involved in creating the Church Rota software which the Kingdom Vineyard use to manage all their rotas for musicians and other volunteers on a weekly basis.

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On average a UK child has just 1,277 days between birth and starting nursery education. The 1277 group wants to ‘make them count’ for the children, for their families and for the toddler groups that they attend by linking together and resourcing Christian toddler groups across the country.

The website was designed to look professional whilst at the same time having a fun, toddler-like ambience. This was achieved through the use of big, bold images and bright colours.

Toddler groups can register on the website, which then allows them to be plotted on a map. Through this map, it is easy to see the spread of Christian toddler groups across the country. The website also allows the administrators to advertise events and resources which will be of interest to toddler group leaders.

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Revd. Chris Duffet (of Light Project fame) was the President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain from 2012-3. As part of his presidency, he did a ‘Big Hearted’ tour of the Baptist Union’s regional associations, intended to get local churches excited about simple, effective outreach projects.

The brief for the website was to give a centralised hub for all the events on the tour, enabling local churches to find out when there was an event organised through them. Picking up on the informal, outreach-focussed nature of the project, it needed to link into a wider multi-media branding initiative and be easy for Chris to update. Therefore, it uses a WordPress backend, which allows him to blog about his tour and update details of events as needed.

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