Example sites

[David Gillaspey]

Hi all,

I'm going through a list of 5,000 church websites, to update The International Directory of Church Websites, of which I am editor. As I do my review, I note the sites that use open-source as well as proprietary Content Management Systems. Here's a list (to date) of sites based on open-source CMS's:

CMS Made Simple (yes, that's the actual name of the CMS):

http://www.betezda.com (a Romanian language site)

Drupal sites:

http://www.cbcspringfield.org
http://www.calvarybible.org

Mambo sites:

http://www.themission.org
http://www.rez.org
http://www.gleniris.net/GIBC/
http://www.zpc.org
http://www.tbcdecatur.org
http://www.calvaryonline.org
http://www.trinityct.org

Joomla sites:

http://www.firstfamilychurch.net
http://www.granitecreek.org
http://www.umheritage.com
http://www.abilene1774.org
http://www.colonialbaptist.org/
http://www.pvbchurch.com
http://www.twincitybaptist.com
http://www.hopepark.com
http://www.lakeshorechurch.com/

PHP-Nuke sites:

http://www.asbury-bett.org

Textpattern sites:

http://www.newsalem.org

Web Empowered Church (TYPO3):

http://www.4fbc.org
http://www.stonebriar.org (very nice site)
http://www.fbcfamilylife.org

Wordpress sites:

http://www.htlcto.org
http://www.saylorvillebaptist.com
http://www.firstlutherandecorah.org
http://www.fbccrowley.com
http://www.calvarysac.org
http://www.cornerstone-cares.org

I'll update the above list from time to time.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[tmreg]

If you run accross any XOOPS powered sites, that would be helpful.

[wet]

Here's another Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/) site: liberti.org (http://liberti.org/)

[David Gillaspey]

Here's another Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/) site: liberti.org (http://liberti.org/)

Hi Robert,

That's a very nice site indeed. Thanks for posting about it. I expect that I'll include it in The International Directory of Church Website Design (http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org), of which I am editor (besides being the admin of this forum). It definitely avoids the "template look."

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[David Gillaspey]

If you run accross any XOOPS powered sites, that would be helpful.Hi Matt,

Here's some:

http://www.albanycc.org.nz/
http://churchthatcares.org
http://www.transfigurationchurch.org/cms/modules/content/index.php?id=2

obtained by a Google search for "XOOPS church".

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Here's another Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/) site: liberti.org (http://liberti.org/)

Hi Robert,

That's a very nice site indeed. Thanks for posting about it. I expect that I'll include it in The International Directory of Church Website Design (http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org), of which I am editor (besides being the admin of this forum). It definitely avoids the "template look."

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites


Hmm,

David can you explain what you mean by the template feel? I made two edgy templates this week which are being used on five sites, all of which look remarkably similar to this one. As a programmer I have never been able to understand what designers are talking about when they say that something looks like a template. can you please elaborate. It might be that I'm just to much of a code monkey and I can't see anything but dom structure anymore, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway.

[tmreg]

Hi Matt,

Here's some:

http://www.albanycc.org.nz/
http://churchthatcares.org (http://churchthatcares.org/)
http://www.transfigurationchurch.org...index.php?id=2 (http://www.transfigurationchurch.org/cms/modules/content/index.php?id=2)

obtained by a Google search for "XOOPS church".


Thanks David. The ChurchThatCares.org site is mine. I guess I am glad I am showing up on Google.

[David Gillaspey]

David can you explain what you mean by the template feel? I made two edgy templates this week which are being used on five sites, all of which look remarkably similar to this one. As a programmer I have never been able to understand what designers are talking about when they say that something looks like a template. can you please elaborate. Hi Kyle,

Sorry for the delay in answering your question.

One aspect of "the template look" is that a particular template design shows up on many different church websites, and so becomes instantly recognizable as a template. The fact that a given website design is a template and not original may be more obvious (because it shows up so frequently) to me than to other people, of course. As editor of The International Directory of Church Website Design, I make it my business to review literally thousands of church websites (14,000 to date, to be exact). So, naturally, I would be more likely to notice the same template being used on many sites.

Here's an example template, one that I've seen countless times:

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/forum_template_example1.jpg

This particular design is somewhat dated, to begin with. You can see it's loosely based on what I call "the curved look"

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/curved_look.jpg

which was popular during the 1990s but has now fallen out of favor with web designers (thankfully). Beyond that, it's an unimaginative design intended to allow the content of any church's website to fit in the middle area. Beyond even that, there's just something about the arrangement of photos that are obviously stock photos in the banner area and the way that they're grossly (in this case, I mean the opposite of "with any finesse") composited with each other, that screams out to me, "I'm a template!"

Now, of course, that's not what you had in mind, nor what I was talking about in my original post. I'm sure your templates are far more sophisticated in design. Nevertheless, for a template to work on many different websites, it goes without saying that the template has to easily accommodate a wide variety of content on a wide variety of websites. This tends to result in a sameness of look.

Also a very simple look. Here's an example; it's not a perfect example of "the template look" but it will have to do for now. (I'll replace it later if I find a better one.)

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/forum_template_example2.jpg

Notice how simplistic the design is. (It's a Mambo-based site.) To be sure, it looks a lot like one of the basic design patterns that I mention in my "Church website design 101" post elsewhere (see http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/forums/showthread.php?t=646)

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/SFCW/basic_layout_101b.jpg

but still, there's a subtle difference. Even the basic (and often boring) basic layout pattern that I just mentioned can be made to look unique, as shown by the screenshot of an actual site in the righthand portion of the jpeg. By contrast, often a template has the same generic look as the stock photo of the unrealistically happy family in the banner of the screenshot at the top of this post.

That site was created using a proprietary web Content Management System (CMS) called E-zekiel. Here's another site created with the same CMS, but designed by Details Communications of Birmingham, Alabama.

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/art/FORUM/forum_template_example3.jpg

Doesn't look like a template is being used, does it?

(There's some historical connection between Details Communications and the company that sells E-zekiel, however. I think they were originally the same company, before splitting, so the designers that work for Details know how to get the best out of E-zekiel.)

Did that answer the question? Probably not. I'll keeping adding to my answer from time to time as I think through the issue.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[Faithhb_lutheran]

David,

I'm going to have to disagree with you on some points.

first simplistic is a derogatory word, minimalistic, is what I would call it and some of us realize that trying to read on a chocolate brown or green-blue background is harder for people so we contain our colors to headers and images. That's a design choice not a deficiency.

Second I see no difference in any of the sites you posted, they all have stock photos, I just one on adobe stock photos that matches the last site almost perfectly, the only difference was in the number of content columns, nothing else, that all the difference ever is, every site nowadays is a template site, the template is header on top, navagation either right below the header or on one of the sides, content taking up from one to three columns, and footer with corporate information, 95%+ of websites follow this template, yet graphics designers scoof at normal people because we didn't use as many colors or as flamboyant of images, and they saw "oh well that's a template site" their all template sites.

[David Gillaspey]

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for replying.

It's hard to answer your question regarding what is the "template look" or respond to your comments when I don't know what your templates look like. Please provide URLs for them.

It may that you will have to discover the answer for yourself, by looking through many many church websites.

Go here:

http://listingstexas.com/Society/Religion/Christian/complete.asp

and go through each of the 1000 sites listed. By the time you're done, I think you'll have your answer. You'll see sites that you think are probably based on a template. Looking at the source code sometimes (but not always) makes it possible to confirm this.

You can get through the 1000 sites pretty quickly if you TAB TAB (to go to next web URL link), HIT ENTER (to view site), CONTROL/COMMAND+LEFT ARROW (to go back to the list) repeatedly. This worked for me several years ago using I.E. on the Mac. Firefox doesn't seem to implement tabbing nearly as well, however. Can't speak for the situation on a PC, since I didn't use my PC for this purpose.

Replace "texas" with "california" or "florida" (or any state) to see a list of church websites in other states.

(These lists were the source for the first 10,000 or so of the 14,000 church websites I've reviewed to date.)

Also, spend time on sites that offer free web templates, and study the template designs there.

Your original post (raising the question) indicated that other designers besides myself believe there is such a thing as "the template look" — so I'm not making this up.

Design templates are not bad — in fact, they're good! The only problem is templates that look to obviously like a template.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[flutem3]

It's hard to answer your question regarding what is the "template look" or respond to your comments when I don't know what your templates look like. Please provide URLs for them.

Hi, Kyle and David,

I think a "template look" is easy to spot. There is a "sameness" about them it seems to me. Or they are just too slick somehow.

Kyle, one of the things you can also do is to look at websites which are not made with templates and see if you can tell the difference. Our website is not made with even the thought of a template.

Even when I had no idea of what I was doing, I knew I didn't want to use a template. For better or for worse I wanted our website to be our design, distinct from others. I think I have done that, but it does not mean that I have designed a good website. The second one is better than the first one. But I still have a lot to learn.

I found it helpful to go to our conference website which has the URL's of all the churches in the conference. Most of them are enough to make you want to cry. Even the District website is appalling in my not so wise or humble opinion. I even offered to help with it, but they said they were going to fix it. That was two years ago.

By looking at terrible websites you can easily learn what not to do...or you can see where one or two things could work if done in a different way. I find those websites just as helpful as David G.'s list of good ones.

David, where did the spell checker go?

Carol

[StubbyD]

Here's a list (to date) of sites based on open-source CMS's:

Thanks for this David.

I've just started - purely for my education at this stage - playing with Drupal and Joomla. What I am pleased to see is that the Joomla sites you have exampled have answered a query I have been trying to work out :)

[David Gillaspey]

I've just started ... playing with Drupal and Joomla.Hi Stu,

I myself am in the midst of reading Pro Drupal Development (http://www.amazon.com/Pro-Drupal-Development-John-VanDyk/dp/1590597559), by John K. VanDyke and Matt Westgate (a new book on Drupal). It's a bit technical for me, but it's helping me to understand how Drupal works.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[David Gillaspey]

Hi all,

I moved the discussion about Firefox to http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/forums/showthread.php?t=660.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
Forum admin

[Faithhb_lutheran]

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for replying.

It's hard to answer your question regarding what is the "template look" or respond to your comments when I don't know what your templates look like. Please provide URLs for them.

It may that you will have to discover the answer for yourself, by looking through many many church websites.

Go here:

http://listingstexas.com/Society/Religion/Christian/complete.asp

and go through each of the 1000 sites listed. By the time you're done, I think you'll have your answer. You'll see sites that you think are probably based on a template. Looking at the source code sometimes (but not always) makes it possible to confirm this.

You can get through the 1000 sites pretty quickly if you TAB TAB (to go to next web URL link), HIT ENTER (to view site), CONTROL/COMMAND+LEFT ARROW (to go back to the list) repeatedly. This worked for me several years ago using I.E. on the Mac. Firefox doesn't seem to implement tabbing nearly as well, however. Can't speak for the situation on a PC, since I didn't use my PC for this purpose.

Replace "texas" with "california" or "florida" (or any state) to see a list of church websites in other states.

(These lists were the source for the first 10,000 or so of the 14,000 church websites I've reviewed to date.)

Also, spend time on sites that offer free web templates, and study the template designs there.

Your original post (raising the question) indicated that other designers besides myself believe there is such a thing as "the template look" — so I'm not making this up.

Design templates are not bad — in fact, they're good! The only problem is templates that look to obviously like a template.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

David,

You seem to be missing the point of my post, In my opinion there really isn't a thing called a original website, with the exception of sites like Flute's, some may be modified, or less used then others, but it's the same structure, changing out a few pictures doesn't make it original, maybe it's just the coder in me getting pissy that designers can "reuse" the same structure with different images and call it original, but it just gets me annoyed. You guys call structure templates "good web design practices" and then scoff at people that have to reuse other images, you all reuse our code, what's the difference?

[ChurchCyberGuy]

Here are some examples of church websites done in TYPO3 that might be helpful.

http://webempoweredchurch.com/examples/

As Great Church Websites continues, I hope it will move from a focus on design and content to a focus on design, content, and ministry features. I think the future of church web ministry is in the interactive database-driven features that enhance ministry. That is the focus of Web-Empowered Church.

In Christ,
Mark