Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

On Sunday, 3 June 2012, amidst the pomp, pageantry and celebration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. King’s Church Medway were having a minor celebration of their own - a launch party of not just one, but three brand new websites which concluded four months of hard work and effort by  everyone involved in the project. If you have followed the journey through my series of case-study blog posts, you will know that I asked to be involved after seeing a new website launched at the beginning of the year by the existing media team and publicly advertised by my Uncle Matthew, who is pastor of the church. I felt that the website was of insufficient quality, that it suffered from a lack of direction and a confused message. It was also blatantly clear that it had been built by someone with little experience and who had gotten by with a huge amount of commitment and enthusiasm. You’ll also know that I started this project by understanding more about the work done by the church, by its ...

It has been nearly two months since I wrote the last part of my series of case studies looking at the project I am currently working on for King’s Church Medway. I’m pleased to say that those two months have not been wasted. We have the skeletal bones of the websites and creative ideas in place, we have a launch date in mind and all hands are on deck adding gloss to make sure that the final products are something that I and more importantly the church can be proud of. With that in mind, I thought that now would be the ideal opportunity to talk about copy. A website generally has many levels of engagement. You have the ‘bouncer’s’; those visitors who have hit your website by mistake and immediately leave. You have those who arrive at the correct destination, but leave shortly afterwards as the site on first view just doesn’t do it for them. There are people who then arrive to be nosey, looking around the website, looking at the pictures and videos with no real aim in getting someth...

I have known for some time that the people of Caring Hands in the Community provide a wonderful service for homeless people in Medway. I’m also aware that whilst their hard work hasn’t gone unrecognised, there has been a lack of information available online about the work that they do. This reason, out of many is why I asked my Uncle Matthew if I could be involved in re-purposing their web offering. On Monday evening, I witnessed for myself a small element of their work which reinforced my opinion and desire to succeed in the project we are working on. Caring Hands was initially started by my Uncle Matthew over ten years ago after a conversation he had with a man outside King’s Church where he worked whilst sweeping the drive. The man was homeless, and without wanting to go into specifics (see the website when it launches!) Matthew felt compelled to do something and shortly afterwards Caring Hands in the Community was born. In conversations over the years Matthew has always been ...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

A lot can happen in the short space of a week. Since I wrote last time and showcased some of the websites that I liked and others that I didn’t, I have met with King’s Church Medway on two separate occasions and formulated the beginnings of a working plan. A plan, that by the time it is complete should see them sitting pretty with not one new website but potentially four! Our first meeting last week was an introductory affair. I met my Uncle Matthew and Austin, a Deacon within the church who overseas the media department and built the current site. Alongside the two of them was a chap named Christian (ironically enough) who wants to help out and volunteered his services just as I had. We spoke about some of the points that I had raised in my original blog post about the current site, we talked about their current working processes and chatted freely about what the new site should do and more importantly some of the things that it needed to contain. Christian also led us through ...

Last week I took a look at a website ( www.kings-medway.co.uk ) which belongs to a church run by my Uncle Matthew and are doing some wonderful work for their local community. I pointed out that perhaps the website could function better and look more professional. More importantly, it should show off some of that great work that is happening on a daily basis and be more accessible for the local people of Medway and beyond. Whilst discussions are very much at preliminary stages as to the concept of the new website, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to look around at other church websites, get some inspiration and look at what people have done well, what type of content is being displayed and what pitfalls to avoid. As design is always so subjective, it should be stated that those that I’ve not particularly liked might well be by others. It should also be worth remembering that someone, or a group of people have put the time and effort to make these websites work, an...

If there has been a common theme running so far through the early stages of this year, it has been work. Not the professional kind, which I’m still playing the waiting game on as to what my future holds exactly - but the stuff I do from home, the little something for a mate, or a friend of a friend. I’ve got a couple of little projects boiling away nicely, including my first Arabic language website which will prove to be an interesting technical challenge, a website for a local car accident repair centre as well as trying to keep up with the brilliant and inspiring courses from Code Academy . Today then, I’m going to attempt something wholly new to this blog and add to my increasingly crazy workload, by starting a series of blog posts looking at the life cycle of a web development project. Starting at the beginning, in looking at an existing website, where it falls short, what it does well, all the way through to research, design and eventual redevelopment and deployment of a new s...