Right From The Heart
3 July 2007This entry in my portfolio has been a long time coming. When you’re doing a freelance project, there is almost always a point where you lean back, kick you feet up, and say, “There. Done.” Then you move on.
But since the Right From The Heart site is my day job, there is no end in sight to its development. There. That’s my explanation to why I am adding this site to my portfolio when I redesigned it six months ago.
Reorganization
When I came to RFTH, the site I inherited had an appealing design, but the organization of the site was confusing. So step one was to reorganize the entire thing.
Here’s one example, the main navigation had a link for “Messages” and one for “Radio.” Let’s say you wanted to listen to a sermon you heard on the radio. So you think, “Well, I suppose a sermon is a message, and it was on the radio. Hmmm….I’ll click on either Messages or Radio?” Visitors were having to think too much and just make a guess. When someone comes to our site, we want them to think a lot about the subjects of our sermons, ourtv/radio spots, and our devotions…but not about how the site should work. Steve Krug wrote a book about this in 2000 (that’s a long time ago in the web world) called Don’t Make Me Think, and it’s still just as relevant today.
For clarity, we also began using the domain rightfromtheheart.org instead of rfth.org.
Redesign
Once the reorganization was done in theory, then I it was time to actually make it happen. There were so many subtle changes I wanted to make, that the site ended up calling for a brand new design, but it was loosely based on the original. Since we’re a media ministry, I decided to go for some darker colors. For this phase I used Photoshop.
Recode
When it was time to turn the comp into code, most of the existing code was table-based and very slight on the CSS. If I was going to spend my days working on this site, I wanted to look at well-structured, clean code. So you see, I really had no choice but to recode the site.
Along the way, I’ve added…
- Simple topical search,
- Browse page with a web 2.0-ish tag cloud,
- Friendlier URLs so that rightfromtheheart.org/mediaplayer/index.php?vid=1506 is shortened to rightfromtheheart.org/video/1506 and http://rightfromtheheart.org/sermons.php?seriesID=88 is now rightfromtheheart.org/series/reluctantwarrior
- Backend Admin, written in Ruby on Rails using ActiveScaffold.
Third Party Tools
Bluehost.com – When I first arrived our site experienced way too much downtime. The previous host would sometimes shut down our server in the middle of a weekday to do maintenance without telling us and just hoped we wouldn’t notice. Since we’ve moved toBlueHost, I’ve found them to be extremely reliable, and very responsive.
Google Analytics – My very first day on the job, November 15th, I started a Google Analytics account. It’s been one of the most valuable tools easily tracking what’s happening on the site.
Aweber Communications – - One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the struggle of sending out a daily email to a few thousand people. When I switched to Bluehost, they only allow us to send out 500 emails an hour, so I was having to set up cron jobs to cue up separate php files to send out the daily devotion. I finally found Aweber. What sold me on them is that they have a feature called “Blog Broadcast” that checks an RSS feed every hour. If there is a new post, then it shoots out an email to every subscriber on the list. Since all our devotions were in a mySQL database, I created an XML file that adds a new devotion each morning at 12am. Aweber finds and sends out the email right away. So far, it’s worked great. The backend is a little slow, but I can deal with that.
Campaign Monitor – This makes sending our monthly newsletter a breeze. It’s built with web designers in mind. It has a simple, clean, interface and great stats. They also have a simple API that allows us to subscribe someone to this campaign monitor site whenever they subscribe to the daily devotion through Aweber.
Light Cast Media – Since we are a media ministry, it’s essential that our video presentation be top notch. That’s why we went with Light Cast to stream our short 30 second videos. They are awesome. See for yourself
TypePad – We use TypePad to host our podcast. Typepad does a good job with integrating into iTunes.
Feedburner – We use Feedburner to keep tabs on our feed subcribers.
What’s Next?
Here are the things I’d like to get done in the near future. I had been waiting to get these done before I posted this article, but I figured that after that, there would be even a few more new things that would tempt me to keep putting it off. Like I said, a good site is never done.
- Allowing comments on daily devotions.
- Branding the ministry with a new logo and identity.
- Integrating Light Cast streaming services with our Sunday Sermons. We’re currently still streaming them as Windows Media files. That’s such an awful user experience, but it’s taking me more time to switch this over than I thought it would.
Here are a few other tools I use to get these done:
| Computer | Mac OS X w/ 23” Cinema Display |
| Code writing | Textmate |
| Graphic Design | Photoshop CS2 |
| SSH Terminal | iTerm |
| FTP Client | Transmit |
| Video Encoding | On2 Flix |
| Organization | Backpack by 37Signals, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc. |
So there you have it. That’s what’s been keeping me busy during the day. I’m enjoying working with RFTH.
Screenshot
commenting closed for this article
I have used Google Analytics and many other web stat tools on the web, However, I find GoStats.com due to :
— Deora Jul 4, 04:06 AM #-advanced referrer displays
-realtime nature of the stats
-inclusion of your website in its top sites directory list, which is a high PR list thus worth the effort in itself;
Andy, nice work on the site, its looks really nice and is easy to get around … great work overall! Thanks for giving us some ‘behind the scenes’ info on how you got this done.
Excellent!
— Chuck Jul 9, 03:37 PM #