Jessica Porter is the designer and webmaster of this 2,175 member church. Her business is Untangled Web Design.

All of us who are involved with the Walla Walla College Church web site were excited to learn that we had won the eChurch Award for November 2005. It takes a lot of work to maintain a large web site like this for a church as active as ours but it is well worth it (even without the award).

My work on the Church web site started my senior year at Walla Walla College were I was working toward a degree in Graphic Design. I ended up using this job as my senior project (a graduation requirement for my degree).

John Cress, the associate pastor in charge of the web site, and I discussed the changes the Church Communications Committee wanted on the web site. Most importantly they wanted a site that was easy to use, easy to update and would be a place members and nonmembers could go for the latest information about Church events. We went through several different designs until settling on what we have today. Then came the “hard” part – plugging in all the content. By the time we were finished we had turned the approximately 12 page site into about 60 pages.

The final step was to add a content management system (CMS). After some discussion we settled on using Macromedia Contribute, because it easily integrated with the site I had designed using Macromedia Dreamweaver and it is a very easy program for anyone to use. Because of the CMS, Debbie Johnson, the Church office manager, is able to make weekly updates to the site, including bulletin information and sermon mp3s. And John Cress is able to create new pages for upcoming events and other Church items.

The new design went up in April 2004. After the site was completed and online I let John and Debbie take over unless there was a technical problem. I finished up my degree in March 2005, got married to Steve Porter in May 2005 and started up my own web design business not long after that. Steve and I are still living in College Place and in the last couple months John and I have been talking about some changes for the Church web site. Some small design changes and minor restructuring should be complete within the next month or so. Both John and I would like to see the site keep growing and changing to meet the needs of the community and we love being a part of that process.