Web Design for The Ethical Society

Web Design for The Ethical Society

We recently had the opportunity to work on a web design and development project with The Ethical Society of St. Louis. An Ethical Society is organized similarly to a religious organization. Instead of being focused on the worship of a specific deity the society focuses on the betterment of people and upholding ethical practices in day to day life.

About the Ethical Society

The Ethical Society of St. Louis came to our attention as a referral from one of our existing customers. The St. Louis Society can trace it’s roots all the way back to 1886. We spoke with the Society’s leadership and discussed the problems with their current site. We also dug into the desires for new features they wanted in the new web design. The primary focus was to improve communications with their congregation. They wanted to present the most important pieces of information in a bold display that limited the choices a user needed to make. For this project a specific budget was set aside to use for development.

original web design

The original web site.

Developing with New Tools

Once we had finalized the contract we dove into the work. We came up with a solution that would meet the society’s need for visual impact  while satisfying their desire for a flexible theme. As a result, the redesign was based on the Beaver Builder theme and plugin. We looked at several page builders and have used similar tools in the past. Digging into the Beaver Builder tool, we found it to be a wonderful resource for building the customizations we needed.

The home page had the most customizations for this build. Each of the four areas on the page brings in content from a different part of the site. We have a featured post, a recurring event, a general text area, and the dominant featured event for the page. Leveraging Modern Tribe’s Events Calendar plugin we were able to provide a powerful tool for promoting the Sunday Platform.

Since there were custom features and the client had limited knowledge of WordPress, we included a two hour block of training time. We gathered all of the clients questions from the span of the project – from template guidance to specific plugin questions and met with them over an Uberconference to address them one by one. The Society has the benefit of some smart technical folks. The training not only covered the list of particulars but we were able to answer some new questions as well.

final web design

The new website.

The Final Web Design

Once the development of the project was completed, the Society had some content migration and some additional styling tweaks that they wanted to perform. They worked through these changes internally and the new site launched. It’s a dramatic change from their previous site and it gives them the flexibility to make changes as their needs change. Consequently, the site focuses on the three core events used on a weekly basis while keeping all of their content accessible when a visitor needs more.

Please note: Links to external companies may be affiliate links. If you use our links, we may earn a small commission.

Written by the Team at Pixel Jar

We hope you got something useful out of that post. If you'd like to read more we have an active blog with topics across the spectrum of website development. If you're researching information for a project we'd love to talk to you about it.

Cloudbleed and AWS – Cautionary Tales

Cloudbleed and AWS – Cautionary Tales

Recently, there have been two major events in the online world that have impacted the way people work – Cloudbleed and the Amazon Web Services outage. While neither of these ended up being an attack, they have certainly brought questions of security to the foreground. We’re going to take a look at the two events…
Read More
Security at Scale

Security at Scale

We recently had a chance to sit down with Tony Perez, the CEO for Sucuri. Sucuri is one of our go-to partners in assisting with our client’s security needs. Talking with Tony Pixel Jar: For readers who aren’t familiar with Sucuri, tell us a little bit about how you got started in the security space.…
Read More

Learn how to understand your website's strengths and weaknesses, and how to make changes for the best possible chance at success.

Download Now

How Can We Help You?

We want to build your next project.

Connect with Pixel Jar

Our Community

Subscribe to learn more about the goings on at Pixel Jar.

  • Note: Your email will be added to our CRM and be used to receive emails from Pixel Jar. You can unsubscribe at any time.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.