I’m happy to announce the launch of radio.lds.org, our site for the Mormon Channel radio station. I led the design efforts, while many dozens of others contributed to the development and implementation of the site.

While not without its flaws, the site is a big success internally for a number of design-related reasons:

  • After planning to put the site in the current lds.org look and feel, once we put content into the template we realized that the Audio Visual department of the Church needed something much more unique and brandable. Late in the game, I designed a fresh layout, and delivered new CSS and image files to development that required just 1 HTML change to the lds.org template (bonus points if you can figure that out). Despite the ubiquity of standards-driven code in our field, this move baffled everyone on our project team, seeing the entire look of the site change with a new CSS file. There are few things you can do to build trust on a project team as powerful as showing this type of design wizardry. People seriously look like you just used the Force.
  • The switch from old look to new look took about 1 week. Whiteboard to Photoshop to CSS, and the AV department was thrilled. With just CSS, we were able to provide AV with a much better website for their channel, while keeping additional development costs to literally 10 minutes.
  • I rewrote the lds.org fly-out menus with jQuery, replacing 480 lines of JavaScript (written 3 years ago by Aaron Barker) with 44 lines of jQuery.

There are dozens of other great features behind the scenes on this site, and again tons of other people helped make it happen. Congrats to our IT teams, and the AV teams and production crews on this huge cache of new content that’s now available worldwide.


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