Key features of this design, learning some lessons from the Adelaides work:

• Again, the design is a child theme of Twenty Ten. In fact there are only four files in the child theme: header.php, homepage.php (home page template), functions.php and style.css.
• The slider on the front page is Dynamic Content Gallery. I’ve used this in a few sites before and it works well for me. I did have a look at a couple of other sliders (and may update this one) but it is functional and easy to configure through the admin screen. I’m displaying a single Category (unsurprisingly called “Featured”).
• I used Gravity Forms for the contact form again. Liking it a lot.
• And this time I got to use Google Fonts. Very straightforward to incorporate in the site.

And I found out that it is possible to turn on page excerpts in WordPress 3.x by putting the following line in functions.php

add_post_type_support('page', 'excerpt');

The next stage in the evolution of this site is to concentrate on the content and refresh that to say something more about the personality and activities of the church. Now that more members of the church can “see” the design, they are better able to suggest improvements. We’re also hoping to keep the information dynamic by including a “grid” (sorry, some ideas are just too good to leave to gov) to be reviewed by the leadership monthly so that we can prepare material in advance.

Most of the photos on the site are by Jonny Ferry, who has a real eye for detail.

I designed and built the first website for APBC in 2002, and the site has been through several iterations since then. The latest version is on WordPress, and uses a modified Almost Spring theme which (I’ve just found out) isn’t available any more from the WP theme directory.

As the site is a church, some customisation was required – in particular to support weekly rotas. I couldn’t find a plugin to do this, so at the moment this is custom code from previous versions of apbc.net called from within individual pages with a custom display in the sidebar, but I’m in the process of converting it to a proper WordPress plugin/widget combination.

The other thing I’ve not been able to find yet is a good calendar plugin to allow us to publicise events well in advance. We’re therefore experimenting with a hosted service from churchupdate.co.uk.

I’ve also encountered some people challenges – in particular encouraging non-geeks to take responsibility for content management and updating information on the site. This has taken a lot longer than I’d expected.