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baileythurley.com 2019

WEBSITE • Bailey T. Hurley • June 2019

When we started Art /Rhetor a handful of years ago, one of our first opportunities was to build a custom WordPress site for Bailey T. Hurley. Bailey is one of our best friends, and she writes on Biblical Friendship for Christian Women. We’ve had the joy of growing alongside her as her design team for project after project, and in four years, we’ve seen her brand grow to a crazy degree of influence through her hard work.

85 features/interviews, a book deal, and 10K Instagram followers later, it was time for a new site. The research, wireframing , and development was an arduous and fun process, the photography and graphical elements came together, and what we wound up with is a really unique approach to a block-by-block website. We built mobile-first and optimized for tons of quick clicks on the many random places a user could enter the site. We learned a lot, and are really proud with what has become a major brand refresh for Bailey.

The site includes a gigantic blog, a sortable list of every feature and publication, a calendar of speaking events, and an online store with lots of Shopify optimization.

See the Site

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parkchurchdenver.org

Website • Park Church Church • June 2017

We set out to accomplish only a handful of things with Park Church’s new website: (1) ease of use, (2) minimalism, and (3) a really functional integration with Church Community Builder (CCB), the database Park Church uses for many things within the life of the church.

First, ease of use. For users, nothing should be interfering with the experience, and 90% of the info they’re looking for should be less than two clicks away. This required the front-end work of dialing in the site page flowchart, maximizing visual space, and knowing when to say yes and no to content. Additionally, we added more for the user by leveraging an HTTPS enviroment and getting sub-second page load times.

Second, minimalism. We found that the style we wanted was different than the huge-header-image, moving background, pop-up window experience that’s quite common. We wanted clean, less, and “really useable.” We found a direct correlation between tactfully “doing less” and creating an easy environment to use. Church websites have tons of content, so we were solving a puzzle of “how do we do less when there is tons of stuff that has to be on the site?” Pages therefore flow from minimal to content-heavy, but only as a user would expect and want.

The home page

Third, the robust CCB integration. The goal was that this new website would show the events, groups, forms, etc. that the Park Church staff was already managing on CCB. Why replicate things on the website? Though CCB does not provide any website integrations of their own, they do provide an API. Staring with a plugin called CCBPress, we re-styled and re-coded thing after thing to make the imported CCB “records” look and behave the way we wanted. The result is a website that does not need to be updated at all on a regular basis, save for sermons. This creates an incredible ease-of-use for the team, in that they just need to keep their respective parts of CCB up-to-date, something they were already doing. Although anyone could have a login, only one staff member uses one, in order to posts sermons. This the website can be entirely out-of-mind for all but one staff member.

The events page

The small groups page

The sermons page

A blog post

We’re grateful to have had the opportunity to take this project, and we’re pleased with the outcome. Click on any of the images above to vists the page represented and begin browsing the actual site.

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The Hive on 16th

Website • September 2016

The Hive on 16th is a Creative Coworking space in downtown Denver. Their space is minimalistic, upscale, and clean, so when they reached out to us to do their website, we had a lot of established identity to build off of.

We’re thrilled with how it came out. The white space, use of photography, and distribution of content feel great. Additionally, this is the coworking space that Art /Rhetor is based out of, so it was awesome to get to build a site for these people we appreciate.

Visit thehiveon16th.com to see the site.
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Campus Outreach Denver

Website • July 2016

Campus Outreach is a well-established college ministry on campuses all over the country. We’re thrilled to have them expand to Denver! Their site had a whole lot of content, but the vision and clear brand identity made it such an enjoyable site to build. We’re proud of the way the image-heavy headers interact with the moderately-sized white spaces. We also built a few custom elements in this site that were new to us, but we’re thrilled with.

Visit codenver.org to see more.
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Bailey T. Hurley

Branding & Website • March 2016

Our first full branding and website build as Art /Rhetor leaves us proud and excited for the future.
Visit Bailey’s new blog here.

The goal was a bold femininity, with a script look that was still entirely readable. In the search for Bailey’s color palette, what stuck the most was the natural “watercolor” blending of blues, greens and yellows.