The Mormon Channel
I’m happy to announce the launch of radio.lds.org, our site for the Mormon Channel radio station. I led the design efforts, while many dozens of others contributed to the development and implementation of the site.
While not without its flaws, the site is a big success internally for a number of design-related reasons:
- After planning to put the site in the current lds.org look and feel, once we put content into the template we realized that the Audio Visual department of the Church needed something much more unique and brandable. Late in the game, I designed a fresh layout, and delivered new CSS and image files to development that required just 1 HTML change to the lds.org template (bonus points if you can figure that out). Despite the ubiquity of standards-driven code in our field, this move baffled everyone on our project team, seeing the entire look of the site change with a new CSS file. There are few things you can do to build trust on a project team as powerful as showing this type of design wizardry. People seriously look like you just used the Force.
- The switch from old look to new look took about 1 week. Whiteboard to Photoshop to CSS, and the AV department was thrilled. With just CSS, we were able to provide AV with a much better website for their channel, while keeping additional development costs to literally 10 minutes.
- I rewrote the lds.org fly-out menus with jQuery, replacing 480 lines of JavaScript (written 3 years ago by Aaron Barker) with 44 lines of jQuery.
There are dozens of other great features behind the scenes on this site, and again tons of other people helped make it happen. Congrats to our IT teams, and the AV teams and production crews on this huge cache of new content that’s now available worldwide.
13 comments
Great work! I appreciate the little development details, and the magic of CSS. The site is an excellent resource and tool.
comment by Daniel Nicolas about an hour later
I am currently learning JavaScript in a Web Languages class, and can’t wait to delve into jQuery. It sounds so powerful! From 480 lines to 44?! That’s insane!
comment by Chris Manning about an hour later
Halle-freaking-lujah. I’ve been wanting to rip that stuff out since about a month after it went live.
It’s been embarassing having that archaic script out there for so long.
Congrats!
comment by Aaron Barker 1 hour later
thanks @daniel for the blog link and nice words..
@chris, if you know CSS and some JS basics, you can code jQuery. love it.
@aaron, was hoping you wouldn’t take offense to that. We didn’t have no jQ 3 years ago. Just to make it clear, Barker is the resident master jedi of code-fu. I’ll be the first to bow down in his presence, and if given the chance I’m sure he’d trim those 44 lines to under 20..
comment by Jason Lynes 1 hour later
Since you provoke (and I want some bonus points too), I will give it a go. What is the HTML change? Is it the the order of the main elements? That the navigation comes last or in other words, the moving of your fly-out menu? To fix the z-index issure or layering of elements? Just a guess after a quick look at the two. And I really like the design. I like the logo/mark at the top. Did you design that also?
comment by Nathan Philpot 1 hour later
hole in one, @nathan. we had to reorder the menu to fix the top positioning. we simply moved the #maincontent closing div to include the #navigation div. now i gotta come up with a prize..
as for the logo, the mark and logotype was designed by David Vandivere of the Church’s Visual Identity Office, who designs all official logos, signage, etc.
more bonus points: can you name the logotype typeface?
comment by Jason Lynes 2 hours later
SAA Series FD?
comment by Jared Fitch 2 hours later
Very nice. A week is furthermore very impressive considering the overhead one normally has to go through at a large organization. Very impressive.
comment by Jamis Charles one day later
Beautiful work as always ya’ll!
comment by Shane 3 days later
Brilliant. I’m going to say it’s the best looking Church site to date (brown-nosing I know), maybe the FamilySearch alpha has a competitive aesthetic edge, maybe… ?
comment by Tod Robbin? 3 days later
This is going to be a great service I’m excited to use it.
comment by Kimi 3 days later
@jamis, even at a large organization, it can be surprising how a bit of earned trust can open doors to getting things done very quickly. of course, my one week of work was preceded by months of budget approvals and vague planning exercises. but in the end, we were able to do something good.
everyone else, thank you so much for the kind words and feedback…
comment by Jason Lynes 3 days later
Would you guys ever make a page, perhaps an interactive one, with the current general authority chart? I think it’d be very useful. Could be put at http://ga.lds.org. Or perhaps there’s already one I don’t know about.
And, yes, jQuery is awesome.
comment by Christian 3 days later
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