axp

Axp is a midweek worship experience for young adults at Second Baptist Church, and I worked with Single Adult Minister Lane Harrison and College Minister Scott McDonald there during the spring of 2004. At the beginning of this internship, I knew I had a lot of work to finish, but I didn’t know, aside from the website, what the work was going to entail. The style guide and quickstart guide sort of came from a need that I could fulfill. I think that’s why I had so much fun with my internship; I knew that my skills were needed. Even more, there was never anyone looking over my shoulder monitoring my every move; Lane and Scott told me what they needed and let me do it. I loved being able to manage my own projects. I loved working with Lane, Scott, and Chris.

Website

My first responsibility was to fill the existing website with content. The August before, Lane hired SPEAK! Communications to create the website, and I used SPEAK!’s sister site SiteWrench to enter and edit the axp content. SPEAK! has a great program, but it was hard for me to work with it because if I needed to change a button or an image, I had to call them to change it. Furthermore, some of the changes I wanted to make would have required axp to pay for them. This is one reason why Chris Austin, the Production Team leader, and I decided to create our own website independent of SPEAK!.

I bought and completed a tutorial to learn Macromedia Dreamweaver, and I brainstormed the navigation and page layouts for the new website, and Chris Austin took those ideas and put them on screen. He and I also created a plan for the new website; the first phase involved loading all the old content on the new site. The second phase, which would be launched in September, would involve a message board, a blog column, and downloadable files of Scott McDonald’s messages.

As the new website continued to grow, I learned that it’s difficult to manage a website without help. Managing a website is a full-time job, but I acquired a few people to help me monitor the message board, write devotionals and a blog column, and update the Journal page. My team was fantastic; and it was a tremendous privilege to work with such people.

Style Guide

While Chris and I were putting together the new website, I encountered a dilemma; consistent style choices had to be made on every page of the website. I began writing down the style choices I made, and this list turned into the axp Style Guide. It is a comprehensive guide for print and online documents, and it includes color usage, type specifications, logo usage, axp style, plus guidelines for grammar, mechanics, and language. It was three appendices, which are style sheets for the Journal entries, website text, and WorshipCenter Pro text, and it has an index. A CD accompanies the style guide and contains logo files, all three style sheets, and templates for flows, letters, and memos.

The style guide was a huge project, much bigger than I envisioned. The more I worked on it, the more I needed to include in it, and the bigger it became. The bigger the style guide became, the more I realized my disdain for Microsoft Word. I have never been a fan of the program, but this project made me more aware that I need better software for projects like the style guide. As I wrote, Chris would change the typeface or the headings or the color, and I changed the typeface and headings and color manually.

WorshipCenter Pro QuickStart Guide

The WorshipCenter Pro Quickstart Guide is a project that came up with the style guide. WorshipCenter Pro is a production program that archives song lyrics and events and organizes slide show presentations for worship services, and we used it for song lyrics at axp. When I began working on it, WorshipCenter Pro 2.0 did not have any help files, so I wrote the quickstart guide using Microsoft Word and FullShot 8.

Edge Community Article
My writing for axp was not limited to technical writing; I also wrote an article for Lane about the Edge Community at Second Baptist. Lane wanted an article that could be published in a Christian singles magazine or in a local magazine, and he wanted the article to capture the vision of the Edge Community. Lane provided a number of print resources he had written about the ministry, and he also provided names of leaders for me to interview. I interviewed a handful of people, read over Lane’s material, and wrote the article.