Mount Zion International School of Ministry went thru major changes and rebranding. They went thru a lot of changes not only in terms of management and the student experience but they also changed their identity including (but not limited to) their name to Summit International School of Ministry, redesigned their logo (by my great designer friends at Hybrid Studios), and needed a totally new website.
Project Highlights
Photoshop PSD to WordPress
Coy Lothrop did their new website’s design and provided me with layered Photoshop PSD files, from which the entire WordPress theme for Summit was custom coded. The entire site was made as a dynamic, customizable website using WordPress’ features such as pages, posts, widgets, menus and plenty more were incorporated into the theme.
WordPress as CMS
WordPress is a full and proper Content Management System (CMS), and this site proves it. Everything is 100% dynamic. Multiple custom post types were used, each with their own set of custom meta boxes (custom fields), custom admin views, options pages and more.
Custom Media Center
The design called for a media center able to handle videos and mp3s of messages recorded from the sunday messages from the school’s church. I was unable to find a suitable WordPress plugin to be able to handle both media types seamlessly and work with the design they wanted to have. A custom media center plugin was developed for them that meet their needs and was easy for them to use and keep updated.
Custom Photo Gallery
The website’s Housing page in the Student Life section was in need of a custom gallery to be implemented. A custom plugin was made that aesthetically integrates the housing page’s design on the public, front-facing views of the website, while the admin back-end was made to be simple & intuitive and integrates with galleries created by the awesome & priceless NextGen Gallery plugin.
Student Blog
Part of the website redesign/school rebranding project included the creation of a student blog: Summit Up. Design-wise, the blog is made to look like the Student Life section of the overall site, but with a few unique elements to make it more blog-like, so a separate custom theme was created to facilitate this requirement.
Lots of Other Features
A ton of other features were made for Summit’s website. They include features such as a parents section, alumni section, paypal powered payment & donation pages, several forms, custom archive presentation of different content/post types, a central admin/back-end calendar that displays varying events among a number of differing calendars, and many more.
