First Congregational Church of West Boylston, MA Website
Date: Summer 2016
The First Congregational Church in West Boylston occupies a red brick building in the middle of a v-shaped intersection in the center of town. This visual being the town center coincides with the identity of the church as being at the cultural center of its community. Additionally, the church has beautiful stained glass windows adorning it's otherwise traditional, white congregational sanctuary. We wanted to capture both of these striking features of the church in our design.
To do this, we designed a header that structurally resembles the church altar: a centerpiece that looks traditional simple flanked by columns. Using a formal typeface and a box-shaped menu structure, the center of the header resembles the formal altar of the church. On either side are rounded images, our "columns" which display both a picture of the church itself and the logo of it's denomination, the United Church of Christ.
From the "Special Services" page, a picture of the altar just beneath our header design.
Beneath the altar on the home page are a collection of large, rotating images that highlight the life of the congregation. Overlaying each are calls-to-action drawing visitors into the interior of the site. These target ministries that are particularly important to the church, including worship, christian education, and community service. The boxes are particularly designed to evoke the stained glass windows of the church sanctuary, using colors drawn from those windows and transparent backgrounds to convey the light coming through them. This design pattern is echoed in the interior pages on a smaller scale, with parallax banner images overlaid with "stained-glass" boxes containing the page titles.
Below the hero images on the front page is a giant parallax image of the church. The parallax design creates an effect of the curtain being lifted, revealing a church that is "in the center" of the design just as this church is in the center of its town. Additionally, we've intentionally taken out the sky background to allow the rising spire of the church to evoke the image of the v-shaped intersection at which the church is located.
A final key feature of this design is the use of a navigation scheme that carefully echoes the mission of the church:
WORSHIP GOD, FOLLOW JESUS, SERVE OTHERS, LOVE ALL
We echo this mission statement through the navigation items: Worship, Follow, Love, Serve, which act as the primary categories for the site alongside "Welcome" and "Youth."
