media salt

Shortly after returing from a mission trip earlier this Summer, our staff felt like God was leading us to start a new initiative to the kick-off of our new church year (August 2). As part of this project, we decided to create an individual “microsite” to support the campaign. With only 2 short weeks at my disposal to make it happen, I had to hit the ground running and come up with some creative solutions.

Since many of you are faced with the occasional “impossible deadline” as well, I though you might enjoy a behind-the-scenes peek at how we were able to pull off so much in such a short about of time.

My goal for the project was to add a lot of community-driven functionality to the site, so I knew I would have to find and adapt some open-source solutions that were already in the marketplace. I also had no budget to work with, so whatever solution we settled on, it had to be free.

With those conditions in mind, I quickly went to work on a site and learned a lot about the great wealth of resources that are currently available out there. Here’s a rundown of the tools I used:

• WordPress - Since I had a monstrously close deadline on this project, I decided early on that it would be best to work within a CMS that I was already pretty familiar with. WordPress actually works really well for a microsite, and the development community surrounding it is just matchless. Within an hour, I had my domain set up and a basic site live and ready for customization. After a little elbow grease, I doubt the average joe will ever realize our final site is built on top of a blogging platform.
• Twitter - Part one of our social communication strategy for this campaign was a large presence on Twitter. We started a Twitter account about two weeks prior to the launch of the site, which helped us build buzz about the campaign leading up to the launch. Now that the site is live, we’ve embedded the official Twitter feed for the campaign into the sidebar of the home page.
• Juitter - Part two of our social communication strategy was to create a common hash tag for the campaign (#lhcrazylove) and embed the community discussion directly into the site. Juitter is a great jQuery plug-in that allowed us to pull this off with very little effort. I highly recommend it.
• Facebook Connect - As the final piece of our social communication strategy, I wanted to make it as simple as possible for our users to leave their comments and join the conversation on our site. Since the majority of our audience already has an account with Facebook, I decided that was probably the quickest way for our visitors to log in. Thankfully, this is relatively painless to implement using the WP-FBConnect plugin that’s freely available for WordPress (the same plug-in we use for MediaSalt, by the way ).

After a lot of blood, sweat and tears over the last two weeks (along with some incredible design work by my wife), you can see the live final project at http://www.crazylovecampaign.com. I was also able to squeeze in some fun CSS 3 transforms (which you can see in Safari 4 & Firefox 3.5) that I might discuss in a future post.

I am truly grateful that we live in a time where it’s possible to pull off so much cool stuff with such limited resources. Don’t feel constrained by a tight deadline when God lays a cool project on your heart; when He calls you do something, He’s faithful to provide the means to accomplish it.