Greenview is a church based in Shawlands, Glasgow. The church has a mixture of ages within its membership, from babies to the more mature adult.
The Greenview project has been a labour of love over the past year and a collaboration of ideas between myself and friend and Greenview elder, Zach Watt, a director at Innovation Digital.
When I joined Greenview I felt that the existing site needed to be refreshed. The content was excellent but the design and layout didn’t do it justice.
I’ve loved working on this website and still enjoy adding new features I feel may benefit visitors. The project has also allowed me to push the flexibility of Expression Engine to the limits.
The website uses EE exclusively with a handful of useful modules, extensions and plugins. I haven’t (as yet) required any custom PHP for the templates which is good.
EE has allowed me to implement an events calendar that occur within the church each day. The calendar will also display the activity that sponsors an event (if appropriate) and who the event is aimed at, pulling resources from commonly used items elsewhere in the site.
Our full time worker/elder, Andy Hunter used to have a blog hosted at Blogger.com but we’ve been able to bring that into the website natively, the same with articles written by church member John Thomson.
The biggest request for this iteration of the website was the ability to listen to sermons or at least download from the website. This is something that will benefited many people, especially those who may find it hard to get to church or work shifts etc. I’ve implemented 3 things here, automatic Podcast via iTunes, online listening facility and the ability to download individual sermons. All sermons are tagged with the particular event they correspond to (i.e morning, evening, special event etc.).
The member section contains resources that are protected by username and password. The members section gives news that is for church members only and is updated by one of our elders. Within this section we also have the church member directory.
Currently the site uses a custom Google search as the main search mechanism, I may change this for the ExpressionEngine search depending on how users find it.
What Greenview now have is a well designed and planned web presence which reflects very well on the church.
Their website shows that church website needn’t be stuck in the 90s. With a focus on social interaction using Facebook, Twitter etc, Greenview will hopefully be able to engage a new audience with the Gospel. Church members will find it much easier to keep connected with everything that’s going on within the church as well as listen to sermons they may miss - a true 2nd chance Sunday 
It’ll be good to watch the analytics and evolve the site as our audience grows.
