Abbey of the Arts
The Abbey of the Arts is a monastery without walls. Benedictine Oblate Christine Valters Paintner offers online classes, retreats, books, and resources to nurture contemplative practice, creative expression, and kinship with nature.
It had been a while since the site was created, and Christine wanted to freshen it up visually; also to restructure things in order to make it easier for people to find their way around. She had quite a lot of pages, but the old menu structure of six pages was hard-coded, meaning that she couldn't update it to reflect the growth of the site.
We started by going through the whole site, making notes on all the content that was there, and then made a list of all the new content that Christine planned to add. We looked at what visitors might want to know or to do. Then we began creating a new three-level page structure, arranging things as intuitively as possible, to help people find what they want as quickly as possible.
With that done, we began to think about design. The old black and purple colour scheme felt a little dark and heavy for such a spiritual website, so we chose a new colour scheme of fresh green and calming neutrals. The old logo stayed, but changed colour. Inspired by the monastic tradition, Christine had the idea to use some Celtic knotwork as a cross between header, sidebar and content area, to anchor the page; in the end we found that the page felt lighter and clearer with a simple border, but we used the knotwork idea in the background instead.
Finally I build the site, matching the front-end menu structure to the page structure in the WordPress back end, so that the 2nd and 3rd level menus will be automatically updated when Christine adds new pages into the structure, allow her to grow the site as needed.