The Objective

The religious institution in this case had yet to embrace the web's fundamental influence in the way people relate to institutions and each other. In fact, the church leader had all but condemned social networking. Project MCV set out to align with the church and provide a safe online haven where the faithful from all over the world could connect with each other more rewardingly. In addition to facilitating file-sharing between users, the network would welcome users to the world's largest commercial trove of professionally-produced, faith-based digital media.

The Challenge

Project MCV faced several sizeable challenges in the business model, especially with regard to church support. The website itself would be largely responsible for conquering those challenges by providing a safe community haven that would perfectly align with church doctrine. The website had already been in production for months before coming to our labs, yet it had been based on early technologies and interface standards. We would have to join forces with the in-house crew to transition into Web 2.0 styles and standards. Then, extensive design and dev would be required to integrate all the bells and whistles, including social networking, effortless content management, file sharing systems, eCommerce and advertising matrices. In short, the project was huge.

The Solution

We began with an extensive discovery process to unravel the existing technology and interface; we would have to find a way to incorporate new, more suitable/scalable solutions before digging in to the code. Given Project MCV's highly specialized needs, consistent open communications between us were crucial. The client's development and marketing teams worked closely with our teams to ensure the new design would win over their target market appropriately. On the front end, an extremely friendly interface was based on a grid layout and tab navigation to accommodate the diverse social, commercial and ad content. The content management system was our central focus due to the clean-content requirement. On the back end, we focused on finding a solution that would scale with Project MCV's sizeable growth plans.

Results

Project MCV's interface is simply stunning, if we do say so ourselves. The top fold of the home page features a classy custom Java-based slideshow to showcase daily highlights parallel to the church calendar. Page navigation is natural, and considerable content is presented without a cluttered feel. The company has earned much respect and support in the church and faith-based media publishing industry. With its new and improved value proposition, Project MCV moved into its second round of funding. We expect you'll hear a lot more about it in the future.

• Registration and set up is easy and fun, with clean profiles that rival Facebook
• Users connect with each other online via a suite of tools
• User-generated digital content can be shared with anyone after passing safety checks
• Privacy settings are at the discretion of the user; he can choose who sees and who doesn't
• Church calendar keeps users tuned in to historical doctrine
• A growing trove of published content is available for sale/download in digital format
• Users can see recommendations as well as easily sort content by category, type, reviews and more
• A scalable backend facilitates site expansion without disturbing existing profiles