Kyle's Random

(This is a repost from my guest post over on the Faith Promise Blog earlier this morning.)

Over the past few months, we’ve made plans for a major update to the Faith Promise Church website as we prepare for the launch of our Blount County Campus in October.  As Brad Roberts and I worked through the process, here are a few things we had in mind:

Let’s help people easily find information that is accurate for their campus.
While the vision, direction, teaching, and core ministries will be consistent across campuses, there are many small variations between campuses, such as different location and contact info, different service times, and different ways of getting integrated into groups.  We set out to make sure that people get the correct information based on the campus they attend or plan on attending.  This means that depending on your campus, certain page contents, graphics, and menu options will be different.

Once people have chosen a campus, don’t make them pick again.
Rather than the annoyance of having to choose your campus every time you visit the site, we’ll store that information for you and take you straight into the site.

Make it easy and intuitive to switch between campuses.
Forced selections on a website make us feel like we’ve stepped into a choose-your-own-adventure book.  (One bad choice, and you’re trapped inside a spooky house or dragged off into the woods by Big Foot.)  Instead, we tried to make the campus selection feel like a light choice that can be easily switched at any time.

Provide a solution that scales well with additional campuses.
Rather than build a system that will only accommodate three campuses (Pellissippi, Internet, and Bount), we’ve built a system that will scale as we continue to add new campuses in the future.

While we were at it, we also enabled mobile video and overhauled the blog.
When you visit the  Series Media page on your HTML5 web-enabled mobile device, you can now watch sermon videos.  In addition, our church blog got a significant facelift.

As of this evening, we’ve rolled out the update.  We’re still in the tweaking process, but you can check it out!

Keri left me with the kids for a few days while she travels with her mom and sister to a cousin’s wedding.  The house isn’t quite as clean as I would have thought it would be, but we’re having a great time!

First thing this morning, my daughter asked me to draw with her and paint with her.  I love the graphic arts, but I have to say that it’s been a while since I spent much time drawing freehand.  The good news: it’s kind of like riding a bike – not something you forget how to do.

This was the first one. I drew my son's lion, and since it looked a little sad, I decided to make it into note to send via MMS to Keri.

We were sitting in my daughter's closet while we were drawing, and one of her dolls was nearby, so I tried doing a pencil drawing.

After that, my daughter wanted to paint with watercolors, so while my son and daughter painted, I sketched out this drawing on watercolor paper. I'll probably ruin it tomorrow when I try to paint it.

The rest of the day was filled with Chick-fil-a, Playmobile, folding laundry together, and ice cream.  I love being a dad!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to make major updates to the websites of Dan & Tamra Novak.

On Dan’s site, we:

• changed over from a static single-page website to a full-blown blogging site.
• kept a similar look and feel as before, but used cleaner lines.
• used Standard Theme as the starting place for the site.

On Tamra’s site, we:

• used the same design as before, but we adapted it to a full 960 pixel width to better feature her photography.
• simplified the navigation.
• switched to a Javascript slideshow so that it would be viewable across most devices.
• added a boutique page, where people can now purchase directly from the site.

Below are a couple of freelance designs that I’ve been working on recently.  The first is a graphic t-shirt design for The Cashmere Bouquet.  The second is a redesign for the Parson’s Table website, which I plan to build out over the next few days.  Both are fantastic clients who give me a wide range of creative license.

There are quite a few blogs that I follow on a daily basis.  Keeping up with friends and family as well as trying to stay sharp in the area of technology and communications.  One of my favorites is a blog called ChurchCrunch.  Because of that, I’m pumped to be a guest blogger there today.

Maybe not the most exciting article unless you’re into video, but it’s cool to get to contribute there today.

I recently updated my personal home page and when I was finished, I recommended the same format for my friend and leadership mentor, Dan Novak.

The graphic in the background is a social network diagram – one of Dan’s specialties as he consults with churches and other companies that want to improve communication and cooperation across their organization (If you were a part of our West Campus, you’ll remember that he did this sort of thing with our group before we launched).

I’m sure that we’ll end up doing more with his site in the future, but this is a cool start.

This past week I finally got around to updating Josh Whitehead’s blog, and I think it turned out pretty nice.  It’s the same basic theme that he already had on there, but I spruced it up a bit.

You’ll need a wide-screen monitor to get the full effect.

I’m a rather huge fan of the Faith Promise Internet Campus.  We’ve added a third service at 9 pm, and this online ministry continues to gain momentum.

The ministry happening online continues to blow me away.  Just this weekend:

• People were connected from four countries outside the United States (Canada, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and El Salvador).
• One family connected from their hospital room the day after their new baby was born. (Yay, Crass family!)
• One family connected while traveling on vacation to Disney. (I think to make the rest of us jealous.)
• Our worship staff connected while traveling home after the roads were closed on their way back from a mission trip in NYC.
• I spoke on the phone with someone who gave his life to Christ three weeks ago while watching the iCampus and now wants to follow up by being baptized.

And that’s just the stories I heard about this weekend.  Many others attend anonymously until they are ready to take the next spiritual step.

My favorite part of the iCampus is that although the staff has provided this tool, it’s people leveraging their social networks via email, Facebook, and Twitter that has spread the word.  If you haven’t already, you’re help letting people know about this would be appreciated and could even make an eternal difference in someone’s life.  Just make sure that you include http:// so that the link will be clickable, and posting right before or during an online service is the most helpful.

To those of you who already play a part in spreading the word and who serve online as volunteers… thanks so much!  You guys rock!

Last night I realized that it was time to update the KyleGilbert.com page.  In the photo above, you can see the old design and the new design format.

I like how it turned out for a few reasons:

• Larger and bolder fonts
• Clear focus on content
• Super monkey-huge photo
• Red hair

The new format is highly borrowed from flavors.me, and I would highly suggest it to anyone who’s looking for a cool and easy portal-style page.

A few months ago, I had the privilege of working with Jason Davis, a local photographer, on the redesign of his blog.  He and I collaborated on the design, and I built out the site.  It features a huge area for content and lets you add a comment without having to reload the post (something I probably need to add here).

If you’re looking for a photographer in the Knoxville area, you need to check out his site.  You’ll see that he does some first-class work.