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A Helping Hand A makeover for Central Community Church
by Gary W. Priester
Dear Gary,My name
is Eric Denton and I am pastor at a church in Riverside, California, with an average attendance of 380, and another 1,000 families that claim us as their church home. We also have a long-running ministry with the
homeless in Los Angeles. Some time back, we created a Web site, centralcommunity.com, and have been unhappy with it from Day 1. We don't seem to know what we are doing in this area. We have worked long hours using
templates from (Microsoft) Publisher with less than satisfying results. We have had an even bigger hassle uploading to our site. I came across the eFuse.com
site, loved the site and the makeover articles, and e-mailed for help. I would love to offer our community a Web site that is effective, interactive, and life changing. A place where people can log on with more in mind than checking the weekly calendar. The purpose statement of my ministry is for changing lives and I would love to have a site that changes lives on a daily basis. Something that offers positive interaction, up to the minute direction, and even cyber-connections for spiritual growth and encouragement. When people visit Central Community they almost always say the same thing, "It was as if I had just come home." I want a site that reflects that feeling. Something that feels like home.
I paid a visit to
Central Community's web site and confirmed Eric's evaluation. There was definitely room for
improvement. Eric and his staff have made ample use of the clip art included with Microsoft's Publisher. The home page has a masthead, three rectangles and a horizontal cross, the
name of the site, Central Community, and its theme line, A Life-Changing Church. The buttons on the left side of the page were logically presented. The center portion of the page
was a little cluttered and needed simplification. Life is not a contest to see how much clip art we can cram into one page. Is it?
The Our Purpose page was more successfully laid out with a ship illustration illustrating the text. The design team had
used initial caps on successive paragraphs to spell out PURPOSE, the site's mission statement. Actually there were several mission statements on this page, which I decided to
simplify by moving one of the mission statements onto the Pastor's Page, which was a bit sparse. 
The soul of the site is on a page called Jackets for Jesus, although it took some digging to unearth the story. Instead of an explanation of what Jackets for Jesus meant, there were
several linked graphics, one that was a question mark and the text, "Click here to find out all the info on who we are and what we do." Following the link I finally discovered that
"Jackets for Jesus was started by Pastor Eric Denton, who commuted to Los Angeles from Riverside to distribute warm clothing and sandwiches to the homeless. After 10 years, the
project has grown to more than 30 workers who travel each week to Skid Row to serve meals ranging from sandwiches and soup to elaborate dinners of roast beef, potatoes,
vegetables, and dessert. They even take full Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners." Jackets for Jesus is Christian charity in its truest sense. |
