Forward Movement Publications

www.forwardmovement.org

Forward Movement Publications, the Episcopal Church's publishing arm, offers pamphlets, booklets, and books that encourage and nourish people in their lives of prayer and faith.

New Forward Movement Homepage

New Page Welcoming the Community

New Prayer Chapel

New Online Store

Old website before redesign

They came to us in December of 2009 for help with their Joomla! website. Their e-commerce website utilized VirtueMart as the shopping cart and was handling quite a few orders every day. However, there were conflicts (which we surmised might be improved with updates). But due to the existing Forward Movement site's highly customized condition, it could not be upgraded easily or without great care, patience, and skill.

With our extensive background and experience working with Joomla and CMS, we took on the project of transforming this wonderfully popular website into a useful and smooth-running destination.

Since the Forward Movement website was extremely busy, any major maintenance or repairs had to be done without interruption. For several months we solved issue after issue, conflict after conflict, installed update after update for all extensions.... Then we could finally upgrade Joomla! to the most recent version as the grand finale.

Here's what Forward Movement's Coordinator of Marketing had to say about working with us:

“Jeanne has been a delight to work with on my company's website development. Her knowledge of Joomla has been invaluable and her cheerful demeanor makes her easy to work with. She helps make something very technical a breeze to understand.”
-- Brad Turner, Coordinator of Marketing

The Re-Design:

With the "engine" running much more smoothly, we thought it only appropriate that the website should now have a new face!

In most cases, our re-designs are actually new website builds... Someone comes along and has an old website that's not worth keeping, so we build them a fresh new one. But the Forward Movement Publications re-design project was a true re-design in every sense of the word. We literally changed the look of their existing Joomla! website by designing and installing a new template over a "live" and oh-so-busy website.

With so many customized scripts and template overrides, this was quite the challenge. In fact, since we needed to keep interruptions to a minimum, we worked behind the scenes on a dummy test site until we were absolutely positive that the switch-over to the new template would be smooth and trouble-free.

The look and feel of the Forward Movement website was changed to a much lighter, uplifting environment -- a big change from the darker look of the original site. There was only one section we felt would work better "in the dark" -- the Prayer Chapel. It needed to be dark, quiet, and private in order to mimic the real experience as much as possible.

Restructuring of Content and Presentation:

While all webpages offer doorways to a website, the Forward Movement homepage has been more like a front door than most other sites we've encountered. We felt it was very important, then, to make it as easy as possible to find the various features without relying solely on drop-down menus. We added some new "showcase" content that indoctrinates as well as routes visitors to where they need to go. There are also three modules that serve to either peak interest or direct traffic to certain key destinations. The layout keeps the more important highlights "above the fold" while still offering content "below the fold" for the more adventurous seekers.

iPhone and Mobile Friendly Layout:

The target audience of Forward Movement Publications has been getting younger and more tech-savvy. Therefore the higher use of mobile devices, especially iPhone, needed to be addressed design-wise. We installed a template capable of displaying a unique layout for mobile phones. It is, of course, very flexible and changeable as well. 

All Services Rendered:

• Project Consultations
• Debug and Repairs
• Updates/Upgrades
• Joomla! Template Design
• Various Extensions Config

Credits: 
Design: Jeanne Pritt
Technical: Jim Sheridan
CMS: Joomla!®

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