Last week we launched our most recent project for Northpointe Church, so I figured I’d share some before and after shots and explain some of the cool things we did.

This project was a blast to work on, Paul (our contact at Northpointe) was/is really awesome and easy to work with, and the project went very smoothly (aside from having to wait a good 2 1/2 weeks to get control of the domain name). Going into the project Paul laid out some basic requirements for the site:

• clean-minimal-ish look & feel
• straight forward navigation
• event calendar
• blogs for each of the pastors
• simple content management
• ability to stream and archive sermons

Before:

After:

The site is running on Wordpress and is stuffed full of our custom plugins (you can see our custom backend in the screenshot above). Some of our other plugins that we added or wrote specifically for this project:

• Event calendar * (allows for simple output wigitized calendars)
• Homepage manager * (for easy management of various elements on the homepage)
• Site navigation controls (Page Order, Page Visibility)
• Flash player injection * (uses shortcode API and SWFobject to insert and render flash videos and audio w/o the need to paste in html)
• Ajax contact forms *
• Custom backend skin *
• Custom Admin Manager *

* This plugin was written entirely or in large majority by us

I have some more elating news, well at least I’m excited about it; yesterday Charles and I signed a lease for our very first office! We are both looking forward to moving out of our dark, depressing home offices into something a bit more professional. You know, somewhere you don’t have to hide your boxers if a client comes by.

The office is on the 3rd floor of a historical downtown building, the Hotel Virginia (built in 1920), that has recently been completely renovated and turned into loft style office spaces. Exposed brick walls, polished concrete floors and views over the city - the space exudes creativity.

Since we just signed the lease, the drywall and final pieces haven’t been put in, but we’re supposed to be able to move in at the beginning of September. We have to send over paint samples to the developer within the next couple days as well as marking off where we want our power/phone/data outlets. We also have a trip to IKEA planned for later this month.

Our one year anniversary of being in business is coming up next month (September 3rd) and getting an office by this time was one of our original goals when we started out. Thankfully this feels more like a natural progression that isn’t being forced. Element really has been doing well and I can’t wait to see where we are next year.