Kaleo Church has re-launched it's website for the 5th time. Our website has been a significant tool in our ministry as an effective way to connect our community, communicate with people who visit our church and non-believers. Through our website we've seen people attend events/services and become Christians.
To commemorate the launch, I thought I'd talk about why we have done this now and in the past and other decisions involved.
Kaleo v5.0 – As Kaleo seeks to launch it's third and fourth locations, we created this design to reflect our multi-site church planting strategy. We also wanted to change the style of design. Our previous website designs were typically black/dark. We wanted to change this to a more clean/white-space design. The functionality is powered by the Ekklesia 360 Church CMS. Some of the changes included:
- Design: A new clean design was used, created by Mark Priestap at Designwise. We partnered with the Journey in St. Louis in sharing the cost for the design and we each customized our one layout to reflect our community. Mark's design was influenced by Mars Hill and we spoke to them to ensure it was ok that we moved in this direction.
- Design: We wanted to put more people and stories on the site. We now have 3-types of Kaleo Stories: Gospel Stories (how the gospel is changing lives), Mission Stories (how people in our community are living on mission) and World Stories (how people internationally are spreading the gospel. The persecution of believers and the church planters we support/pray for.)
- Content: Changed a lot of content, such as the gospel, added Mission, Serve & Connect sections and other pages.
- Media: We centralized all sermons (previously on three pages) to one Media & Messages page.
- Blog: We added a blog to the home page for better updates/communication.
- Social Networking: We added a backend for community members to create their own page, blog, galleries, commenting on content, participate in groups, discussions, etc. As part of the previously mentioned Mullet Strategy – "business in front, party in the back".
- Event Registration: The site now has event registration both for free and paid events.
Kaleo v4.0 – While we had this site, we moved into AMC Theaters for our Mission Valley service. We had the site up less than 2 months when we launched our 2nd site at San Diego State University (SDSU). We had decided to move to a multi-site, multi-congregational church planting strategy. The site was designed by Church Plant Media and the flash was done by AM Design. This was our first transition to the Ekklesia 360 Church CMS. (click on design for screenshot) Some of the changes included:
- Content Management System: CMS to manage content (sermons, articles, events, pages, etc.)
- Design: First design not created by me!
Kaleo v3.0 – This was the site we had when we moved into a church building because we outgrew our warehouse. The design was created by me and used a php/mysql database. We managed it through phpMyAdmin. Chris Livhdahl and I did most of that. Click on the image to the right to view an interior page.
- Dynamic – We moved from a static, hard-coded site to php-based.
Kaleo v2.0 – While we had this website, Kaleo 'went public' in 2004 with a move to Sunday morning service in a warehouse we rented. We went public when we had about 50 adults attending the church. This design was created by me (man I'm glad I don't design anymore). It is a static site that better laid out content to view. Click on the image to the right to view an interior page.
- Flash – Each interior page had a unique flash header.
Kaleo v1.0 – This is our first site ever. We launched this site as we began to do services with a core group of a dozen or so people in the 2002-2003. I had 7 or so images for the home page that were selected at random to give it a changing appearance. Click on the image to see another home page.
