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Re-design in real time - Part 1

Today I start a new series of articles on the redesign of a site that I am currently involved with. The site is Christ Church, Southport. This is the web site of the Christian Church that along with my family I have been attending now for just over 7 months.

The site itself is nothing special. It is there purely to present information about Christ Church. None of the content is driven using server technologies such as (PHP, ASP, CFML etc), though updating the content is done using Macromedia Contribute, since this offers the Church administrator a simple cost effective way of changing the content as and when required.

So why you might ask I am burning the midnight oil redesigning this site. Well it boils down to three main issues.

• The site is currently framed which is preventing the site from obtaining a higher ranking
  in search engines / directories.
• The index page (Home) does not lend itself to new information being added.
• New pages cannot be spawned from Macromedia Dreamweaver MX templates and so at present the Church administrator cannot harness full potential of Macromedia Contribute.

The site as it currently stands is a stop-gap and I for one am very grateful to the developer who spent considerable amount of time putting it together.

Initial site assessment

• Remove the frames and employ techniques that will improve the site's search engine / directory rankings.
• Re-design the index page so that new content can be easily added.
• Re-design the inner pages and create new layouts that will make it easier to add new pages and new sections.
• Convert primary, secondary and tertiary page layouts into Dreamweaver MX templates to facilitate Macromedia Contribute integration.

Stage 1: Remove the frames and improve search engine / directory rankings.

Frame removal

Removing the frames is straight forward enough. At present the non-framed version of the site currently sitting on my staging server so that we can check to make sure we don't have any broken links and that the 'tweaked layout' doesn't fall to pieces in early versions of PC and Mac browsers.

Improving the search engine ranking is still being worked out and so I'll report back on that once the text components, link components and key words have been analyzed and tested.

Stage 2: Re-designing the Index page

In order to re-design the index page I started by creating some thumb nail sketches on paper. The ones that I though most appropriate for this site have then been converted into wire-frames done using Macromedia Freehand MX. Freehand MX is an incredibly powerful vector based drawing tool and therefore ideal for this task. At my next meeting I'll present the prototypes and once a decision has been made I'll post again and discuss the process of creating a more detailed visual. mf

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