Determining Your Church Website’s Basic Layout: The Wireframe

This post in the Using WordPress to Run Church Websites series is about deciding on your church website’s basic layout structure.

Since this is my tutorial series and there are seriously a near infinite amount variations one could use for a website layout and structure, I’m going to write it the way I do it. :-)

Oftentimes this stage is called doing the “wireframe.” For simplicity, I’m just going to say — the basic layout of your site, OK?

Generally speaking, below is the basic layout I use for most websites (not necessarily blogs as you can tell from this one and my other ones).

wireframewordpress

Now, let me walk you through this basic layout by numbers. [Note: For some of you, it’s going to seem very elemental. If so, go on to another post. :-) ]

1. GRAPHICAL HEADER — This area will likely include my church logo or some sort of a photo possibly … it may even include two graphic areas.

2. MAIN NAVIGATION BAR – Like most websites, this area will house the main navigational links (or site categories) like “About Us,” “Ministries,” “Resources,” “Calendars,” etc.

3. SIDEBAR – I will also be referring to this sidebar as the “sub-nav sidebar.” This section will likely house an email subscription form, possibly a search box, and the interior pages within our “main navigation” that I referred to in No. 2. For instance, the main navigation may have a link to “About Us.” That section will most likely have several pages like a contact page, pastor bio page, beliefs statement, history, etc. The idea is when someone clicks the “About Us” link, in this sidebar section, all those sublinks will appear naturally. [If you’re lost, just be patient, help is on the way!]

One other note about this sidebar section … I think this is one of the key tweaks to make WordPress look less like a blog and more like a typical website. Over the last couple of weekends I’ve been reading and research for how to do this. So I’m excited to walk through it with you.

4. MAIN CONTENT AREA – Obviously this section will be the main text of each page in the website.

5. FOOTER — This will include copyright information, a “contact us” link, phone numbers, address, and maybe even a link to a Google Map for driving directions to your church.

6. PAGE BACKGROUND — I included this element because we’ll be tweaking an existing WordPress themes and possibly the background image or colors.

Note: This is the phrasing I use and will not necessarily match the same terminology used in WordPress help files or even other website designers.

OK, now that you’ve seen the basic layout I use for most of the websites I design, now it’s on to finding a theme that can fit this!

See all the posts in the Using WordPress for Church Websites series here.

January 25, 2007 · Filed Under Church Marketing, Web Site Design, WordPress

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Comments

4 Responses to “Determining Your Church Website’s Basic Layout: The Wireframe”

Brian on January 25th, 2007 9:04 am

Glad that you’re doing this series. What I’ll be interested in is what is the best way to manage multiple authors - or even different owners of different content areas. For instance, I want multiple people to be able to post articles(blog entries) and will need them held in moderation until approved by a central administrator. Harder than that - I think - I want people to be able to update pages related to their specific area are but not be able to touch anything else.

Thanks again!
Rich Schmidt on January 26th, 2007 5:32 pm

Brian:
I’m not sure, but that “not be able to touch anything else” part might be tricky with WordPress. I could be wrong, though.

If we’re talking about a church website, what’s the reason for not letting them touch anything else? If you can’t trust them to keep their hands off other people’s content, maybe they’re not the right person for the job…?

If you’re talking about not letting touch admin functions, that’s different (and easy).
Cory Miller on January 27th, 2007 10:49 am

Brian & Rich, you can set various levels of what a “user” can do in WordPress. Here is the support page on that …

http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
Brian on January 29th, 2007 8:07 am

Rich - Thanks for the response. It’s not really an issue of trust. It’s more that I don’t want non-technical people accidentally doing something that would mess up another piece of the site.