Redesign of the Stonebriar Site

By: Ron Hall

In the TYPO3 community we spend much of our time talking about technical things such as how to configure a particular extension or the ins and outs of TypoScript. This is all fine and dandy, but sometimes we lose appreciation for the forest as we wander about our trees of code. Every now and then we need to be reminded of just what this tool of TYPO3 can produce when used well. With this in mind, I intend to periodically point out some well-done sites using TYPO3.

One site that has recently been redesigned is www.stonebriar.org. This is a site for Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas. Stonebriar has run on TYPO3 for a couple of years, but this was a total redesign of the site.

Some of my readers may be surprised to see this much sophistication in a church site. Stonebriar is a large church that communicates to thousands of people every week. but they are not an anomaly. Off the top of my head, I can name 10 churches within 15 miles of me with a weekly attendance of 3,000 or more (2 over 20,000) and the actual number is at least double that. In order to communicate well to their large congregations, each of these churches have multiple-staff communication departments often with at least one person dedicated to the web.

But back to the Stonebriar site. The redesign of this clean, visually rich site was managed by my friend, Jason Reynolds, who is on staff at the church. His full-time responsibility is the web site.  While managing the project, Jason put together a team consisting of:

• Chris Merritt (www.pixelightcreative.com) for visual design
• Nathan Smith (www.sonspring.com) for front-end coding (XHTML, CSS, Javascript)
• David Lanier (www.davidlanier.com) for TYPO3 coding

In addtion he received support and help from WEC (Web Empowered Church--www.webempoweredchurch.com) a great supporter of TYPO3. Jeff Segars, an extension programmer for WEC, was of particular help.

Take a look at this site and appreciate the work that went into it. Particularly look at the nice bit of scripting (courtesy of Nathan Smith) when you click on "Ministry Index" in the upper right of the page. Nathan has a post on the Stonebriar relaunch at sonspring.com/journal/stonebriar-relaunch.

Notice that this redesign required the expertise of multiple people. This is a reality of modern web design that I plan to address in a future post.