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Dulles Community Church

Posted on March 9th, 2006 by Shane

Alright, back to English today and another site that came in through our submit a site section. This time it’s the site for Dulles Community Church outside of Washington, D.C.

There are lots of things I really like about this site. Let’s start with the color scheme. Very well done. Calm and pleasant, but very, very sharp. Very nice use of the burnt orange color to indicate important items, too, and it’s not overused.

I also like the background. I’m a sucker for nice backgrounds (a really good one is so much better than a solid color), and this is definitely a nice one. It does a great job of framing the content.

They also make very heavy use of CSS to give the site an interactivity that most people depend on Flash for. In fact, many people would probably just assume that the dynamic elements are Flash unless they looked at the code — especially the big image at the top that you can scroll through. Very well done. I also like the subtle animation of the arrows in the Upcoming Events block — not too over-the-top, just enough to give you some urgency to click on the link to see what could be so important.

Most of all, I like that someone there clearly understands how critically important design is in their larger mission of getting people who have never considered church to give it a second thought. Many sites in this vein don’t do themselves any favors in that regard.

What would I change? I’d make the font size bigger (I’m just a proponent of larger font sizes), and I’d put more images into rotation at the top. That’s a great element not to have more than three pictures in it, and pictures tell stories that thousands of pages of content never could.

All-in-all, though, I definitely think this is a fantastic site. Be sure to click through to view the whole site, because the thumbnail above just doesn’t do it justice.

What do you think?

Update: Just talked to the guys over there and found out that the designer of the site was Rob Soulé. He’s got his own site over at couchfort.net that’s worth a look.

Tags: Church Website, Graphic Background, Medium Background, Tabbed Menu, U.S.

Rated 7.3 from 24 votes

More Opinions on Dulles Community Church

Very clean design. I like it.

– Jero
I ran across this site just yesterday. Very nice design. Much better than a lot of church web sites that seem to be stuck in the early 90’s.

– Chris Huff
Its great in all but one respect - its very very slow. I realise its getting extra traffic from gallery sites at the moment but it still shouldn’t be that slow.

Better hosting or better compression required!

– Kev
It’s actually popping right up for me, and both the code and images are very tight. I’m betting there’s a problem somewhere else along the line.

– Shane
Nicely done , finally a centered website :P
niec use of colours and round rectangles, makes it cute :)

code is dope , great job to the coder ….

one other thing i really liked about the website is its black out glow , i love those. :)

thats all

– Sasan
Someone commented that the site was slow:

Here’s why: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://www.dulleschurch.org/

More than 200KB of images on the one page!

That aside, lovely clean design.

– Jachinls
Nice catch, Jachinls. Here’s a question I don’t know the answer to, though: most of the images are contained in the CSS but not displayed on every page (e.g. it contains the headers for every page, only one of which is ever shown on any one page). Are all those images downloaded anyway, even though they’re not all used on the page?

– Shane
Rob, I’m so proud of you! I was lucky enough to see this one before it was live and I loved it just as much back then. Rob is amazingly talented, both as a graphic artist and as a rockin’ coder backstage. I love to sit and read his code, it’s so pretty. :)

Love the cool colors with complimentary softness in the corners too. And yes, the CSS flashiness is most definitely apropos. Kudos, Rob.

– Natalie Jost

Dulles Community Church

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