PIXL Designs

We’ve been talking about our design experience with Pleasant Hill Baptist Church all week. Today we are exploring color. This is such an important aspect of design. Many people go with something that looks cool, versus something that complements their client on multiple levels.

We chose a burgundy and white color scheme after visiting the church and noticing a faded maroon carpet. We wanted to bring this color to life online and provide a rich experience that didn’t get in the way of the content. Thanks to Standard Theme, changing up the color was extremely easy via modifying the custom.css file.

Designers need to remember that little details such as color can be the key to a well-received design. The last thing you want is a first-time visitor or guest to visit a website with bright green and blue colors and walk into a sanctuary with maroon and white.

When working with Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, we wanted to use a few unique tricks of the trade. One of these was using the iPhone for the church’s homepage photo. Often I place quality over the cool factor, but the iPhone is very capable and the Photoshop app is simply amazing. The trick was finding the right time to shoot the best picture.

As a freelancer, you want to make sure you build flexibility into your schedule. And you also want to try and capture the moment versus scheduling a forced-moment. So one afternoon when I was driving home from work I realized the sun was perfect for a photo. I swung by Pleasant Hill since it is near my home and snapped a few photos as the sun was setting through the trees. I think the effect was great!

The beauty of being a freelancer that exists for local churches is you can do something like I did. Working within your element and community provides you with an advantage other businesses wouldn’t have. This is what drives us and we are excited about the possibilities with investing in our future!

So we have been working hard to help Pleasant Hill Baptist Church get their website up and running. It has been a great experience working with people that are generally excited about bringing their church into the 21st Century. Pastor Chad Beck is a great pastor that loves his people and has a heart for the community. Often when you work with churches, you encounter many obstacles and rigid opinions. Pastor Chad has placed complete trust in us to provide quality services that meet their objectives versus their opinions on what a website should have.

In order to reach people no one is reaching you have to do things no one is doing. This is our motto at PIXL Designs and so we incorporated several elements into Pleasant Hill’s header that restate the obvious – name, location, and phone. The biggest objective for their website right now is to become visible and allow people to find them when searching online.

We’ll be sharing more on our design process for Pleasant Hill this week, so be sure and stay tuned. And as always, we’d love to hear your opinion so give us some comment love!

Less is more.

This is our philosophy behind design. We may look to other web sites in a particular category to get ideas, but our ultimate design philosophy is we want to communicate everything with less.

I personally love Twitter because you are limited to 140 characters. Everything you have to say must be 140 characters or less—or it can’t be posted. When building a site here are the main objectives we follow:

1. Less is more.
2. Lean is green. Cutting out things that don’t belong are always green lights for us. It’s easy to overcomplicate things. You always trim the fat before you eat the meat, so why should the web be any different.
3. It’s the little things that matter. A shade of color that is too bold in the wrong spot can completely throw off the look and feel of a web page. Pay attention to detail, while maintaing consistency for your objectives.
4. Follow your heart. This is an odd design rule, but sometimes you have to go with your gut and follow your heart. Don’t overthink it. Your clients will have changes. Just do your best and remember that the web is always morphing and changing. Nothing is ever completely static. Everything can always be improved. Meet your objectives and don’t beat yourself up by trying too hard.

These are a few suggestions we have and rules we follow. We hope they will help while recognizing once again, there is so much more to learn and do. Our goal is simply to share our process and of course we would love to hear about yours!

Color. Color. Color.

This is the hardest aspect, I believe, to launching a new Web site. There are so many options with color (literally unlimited options), and thus it takes QUITE A WHILE to settle with a color choice I am satisfied with.

Usually we choose a color to begin with and slowly but surely customize it as we go. With Pleasant Hill Baptist Church, we are currently working through a color scheme that matches the church interior. There aren’t many accent walls, so the carpet (a maroon color) was our first choice.

Maroon is a churchy color. It is also traditional, though, and can speak to some of the aspects of Pleasant Hill. But Hill speaks of green grass. And there is a lot of this surrounding the church.

So do you combine the two? Find shades of each? Choose one over the other? Choose and interior color or an exterior color? Orlinda, TN is also the ‘Sunniest spot in Tennessee,’ so do you choose a color reflective of the community?

SOOOO many choices and so few answers. But that’s fine. Color evolves as the design comes together. Choose a palette that is the most rounded in matching the overall experience of your church or business. Complement it with the community makeup or the nature-related themes around your location, and finally let it be creative and have its own voice.

Wow, that sounds so assuring and concrete, eh? Creativity is just that. And those are a few of the questions we ask and thoughts we have as we work through a very critical part of the initial design process – color.

We currently use Google Domains (GoDaddy’s partnership, not eNom) to purchase domain names and Media Temple for our hosting solutions. This gives us a lot of flexibility for two reasons:

1. Google Domains automatically installs email AND let’s your info remain private in the WHOIS database all for just $10 a year! You would be amazed at how many spammers attack your site from the WHOIS database. I made that mistake once and vowed to never make it again. In addition, having email setup without installation and functioning through a robust Web service like GMail is pretty awesome.
2. Media Temple has extraordinary customer service and great hosting solutions. We have always had rock solid service, very few outages, and Media Temple allows us to have up to 100 domains on a single hosting platform. This allows us to easily switch between Web sites when we are doing routine checkups and maintenance. In addition, it offers more robust updating for WordPress at times than the wp-admin!

We’ll have more to share as we go through the design and setup process for Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. Hope some of our advice has been helpful!

We love to share what we do as we go through a new design process. Soon we’ll be announcing the launch of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church’s online presence. Here are a few quick things we learned this time around:

1. We learned that domain names can disappear overnight. We had already settled on a domain name but were waiting for the deposit to come through before we purchased. Unfortunately a church in Texas bought the domain and launched their ‘coming soon’ within a few hours.
2. So we learned to be creative. We almost and hour searching through to find that perfect selection with the right ring and feel. The client signed off and we made the purchase. While it wasn’t our first pick, I think it is going to be beneficial to our client in the long run.

Common Sense Rules
Domain names should always be personable and easy to remember. This is common sense. They should also help with your SEO and achieve your goals. In our case, the church name is Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. At first, PHBC.org seemed like an easy domain choice (thankfully it wasn’t available). But ultimately this wouldn’t be recognizable for the audience they are trying to reach. So we regrouped and came up with a more appropriate name (we’ll tell you soon).

Think practically.
In Web design, it’s really easy to get carried away with the creative elements. There are sooooo many tools, it can make your head spin. We chose to use Standard Theme, which our own blog is run on. This enables us to work on building a simple Web site without overthinking things too much. As time goes on and there is an opportunity for a redesign, we can easily customize the templates through CSS.

We look forward to sharing more insights with you this week. We’ll also be announcing the launch of the new site hopefully in the month of April, so stay tuned!

We have spent the past couple of years staying up-to-date on HTML/CSS trends which are the basic building blocks of Web sites. Building sites entirely from scratch in HTML is really hard to do. Almost two years ago, however, we discovered WordPress. Wordpress is essentially a blogging platform based on PHP and MySQL that has theme support and let’s you code in your designs. In layman’s terms, WordPress allows you to install pre-built themes (free or for a small price) that are secure and robust, and allow to easily customize your design.

I believe in the power of WordPress. Clients today want to update their own site, customize their content and generate revenue from their site and services. WordPress allows me to do all of this and still maintain a solid design. There are numerous sites you can purchase themes from, but some of our favorites are found at Woothemes. Currently we run a beta of Standard Theme from Human3rror and will be implementing it across multiple sites when it is released in full.

WordPress churns due to its extensive widgets and plugins libraries. There are numerous easy-to-use add-ons that allow you to add

• Google analytics
• Ssearch engine optimization (SEO)
• Calendars
• More!

And best of all you can add these with the touch of a button and free of charge!

We are huge proponents of WordPress and believe it is a technology that will continue to grow and evolve to keep pace with the Internet. If you are a freelancer that is looking to help your clients develop an active Web presence and take their sites to the next level, then don’t hesitate to being using WordPress today!