My recent tenure at Church Media Group has me in a dilemma between solving a user-experience problem and monotony on the web. You see, in the niche we fill at Church Media, there are a number of “standard” features and modules that most of our websites get. This includes things like audio and video pages, events, contact forms, etc… For all of these, we’ve built a default look and feel that solves the problem in the way Church Media would do it. They’re easy to implement because the back-end and front-end is already done, and it’s usually just a matter of changing colors and widths to get a module ready for launch.
One of the things we pride ourselves on our package websites is every site gets a completely custom homepage. You could look at our portfolio and debate with me how “custom” they look, based on the frequency and familiarity of the elements used, but I can assure you as one of the designers, these homepages are custom. And the fact that you would even debate with me the authenticity of our claim that our designs are bespoke and unique is an indication of a problem.
Take, for instance, an events module. This has been one of the things the design team has been talking about lately, so I think it fits well within this discussion. We have a standard, tabular look to our events listings that is our goto layout for these sections. The problem is, we don’t really feel like we’re solving any new problems or branching out and trying new things with them. I recently tried to rectify this and designed an events listing that scrolled using the jQuery cycle plugin. This was fresh to us. Often, we’ve been content to just stick with what we know works and not try anything new. But what could you try that is new? There’s not too many ways you could design a listing, constrained also by outside factors such as budget, timeline, and other constraints, so we usually just rest on our laurels and do what we’ve done before. I feel like we could do better, but I’m not sure how yet.