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The challenge: Introduce a rapidly growing church community to the populace at large and allow church members to keep abreast of activities. Build a framework that can be expanded upon by church members.

The solution: Build a simple, yet attractive site with clearly defined navigation links.

The skinny: Like the Central Connecticut Tourism District, the use of existing collateral materials plays a vital part in building this site.

Designers don’t always get to start with a clean sheet of paper. Sometimes, as in the case of Walnut Hill’s web site, work must incorporate pre-existing design elements. Here, the church’s logo — it’s colors, curves and angles — had to fit seamlessly into a web site redo. Respect for another designer’s work dictates that my work be complimentary and at least of equal quality.

The result is a bold swish that spotlights the logo and highlights the menu selections. Of great importance to this church is it’s motto. A bit lengthy at a dozen words, it would not fit easily into the scheme of things, so I incorporated it into the logo as an animated GIF. The animation is a continuous loop from logo to motto and back. It’s a bit unweildy at 114k, but it works.

The design elements carry over onto all subsequent pages giving the site a cohesive look.

Update: Design of this website is now in the hands of another designer.