Cottonwood Creek needed a way to manage
a website for 10 separate, but related
departments. I developed a ground-up content
management system that allowed each department to
have a unique look and feel.
Learn more...
Designing for a Purpose.
Cottonwood Creek Baptist Church is a very large church in Allen,
TX. When I arrived, they were rapidly outgrowing their existing
static website, and they asked me to come up with a solution. One
of the key requirements was that each department wanted the
ability to maintain their own look & feel, as well as create and edit
their own content.
To meet their needs, I developed a multi-departmental content
management system and PHP framework to make it easy to
develop unique looking department ‘themes,’ while maintaining
the standard layout and navigation scheme of the larger site. The
entire system was controlled by a central maintenance application,
designed to be easy for ministers to use with little to no training.
Blazing a Trail.
The work I did fro Cottonwood Creek was done at a time when
Firefox was still considered ‘new,’ Chrome didn’t exist yet, and
nobody had really heard of AJAX. Designing a good looking
website that could be edited by non-designers and still work in
IE5 for Mac was, to put it mildly, challenging.
We couldn’t use CSS for much, because it just wasn’t supported
well enough, so everything had to be done with table-based
layouts. Nevertheless, Cottonwood Creek was one of the first
sites to make heavy use of PNGs (using some clever hacks),
and JavaScript UI.
Rapid Response.
Life at a large church moves quickly, and I was frequently
asked to develop custom applications on very short notice.
Custom front page splashes for special events were common
as well. Using our existing code framework, I was able to
easily deal with these requests, often turning around
complete web applications within mere days.