Here Am I Send Me
Special Features
WordPress blog, several slideshows, Flash video, digital image-editing
Site Design Summary
Tony Pearce is a short-term missionary who is absolutely on fire for God and is passionate about sharing the Good News with others. Not only does he witness and minister to other people in his hometown every day (in addition to working full-time in the concrete business), but he also takes mission trips as often as possible--at least once a year. Tony wanted a site that would 1) ignite passion in other believers to share the gospel, and 2) display the mighty works that God has performed in the midst of Tony’s mission endeavors.
With those goals in mind, I created a site with a dramatic feel using only photos that Tony had taken himself. Since Tony had no idea what he wanted the site to look like, I had to take his ideas, goals, and passions and transform them into a design. With a lot of digital-image editing and a few fun tricks in Photoshop, I ended up with a unique layout that has a traditional website feel that I thought he was looking for while still breaking out of the box. Overall the site has a deeply moving effect, which I attribute completely to the content--the photos from Tony’s international mission trips and the videos of hundreds of people raising their hands and accepting Christ just take my breath away.
This site was a challenge to create, and I admit I went overboard on the graphic images at the top of each page. If I had it to do over, I would use only a handful of images instead of a different one for each page of the site. The download time of that many high-quality images is intolerable to me, but I could not go back and re-program the way I did it very easily. (Definitely a lesson learned there.) The video quality was perhaps the biggest challenge. With several 30+MB videos to display, we just didn’t have enough bandwidth to handle them. Instead I compressed them into Shockwave Flash videos, sacrificing most of the quality in order to have quick download times. Had the website been the primary goal when the videos were created, we could have prepared the videos to be more usable for the internet. However, given the quality of the videos to begin with, we were pretty limited with our options.
Technicalities
XHTML, CSS, JavaScript
Software Used
Adobe Photoshop 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004, WordPress, Macromedia Flash MX 2004