The Need
Hurricane Katrina left behind a lot of damage in 2005, but in its wake grew the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s realization of the need for a Short-Term Missions and Disaster Response Coordinator—someone to organize and coordinate the different projects. Enter David Nakhla. Newly appointed to the newly created full-time position, he realized a website would be needed for the work.
We built the OPC Short Term Missions (STM) committee a website with one main function: to publish the latest news about the church’s STMs and disaster response work in the world. The site also lists current opportunities for service, and provides a way to apply and register for the trips. There’s also a way churches can request teams to come help them.
Organizing Stuff and Building The Thing
One of our priorities here at 5MT is equipping our clients to manage their own websites. WordPress offers a variety of ways to organize content through categories and tags. We gave the STM team orientation training and consulting as we worked together to best organize their articles and other content: what the menu should look like and which boxes should go on the home page — and where — and how to connect the site to their Facebook page.
We developed a custom WordPress theme for the STM site. Later, when we redesigned the main OPC site, this one got an update as well: we implemented a responsive design to make it mobile-friendly.
Final Product
The resulting website echoes the main OPC site’s header, giving the two a visual link. Site visitors can browse the well-organized the stories, photos, and articles about the OPC’s multiple projects in countries around the globe, from Uruguay to Uganda to the Ukraine to the USA, and apply and register for STM trips.
