2011
Brendan Pittman and I designed a new main site for The Austin Stone Community Church. Because its a church site, there was a lot of content that needed to be accessible for a number of different types of users. Some need to know how to get to church on a Sunday, others live out of state and want to know how they can download the latest sermon. One of the main challenges was to make all the content available without the site feeling clunky or crowded.
Another weird thing about a church site is that its hard to make it not feel like an institution. Of course, it is an institution, but it's made up of people and the people are the parts that matter. With this in mind we tried to add elements to the site that made it feel more human and personal, instead of cold and faceless. We tried to allow some of the personality of the people, both individually and as a whole, to show throughout the site.
