Catholic Diocese of Arlington
Revitalizing the Catholic Diocese of Arlington’s digital home with a website redesign that honors its mission and enhances visitor experience.
Challenge
The Catholic Diocese of Arlington is a thriving community that serves 70 parishes in Northern Virginia. Since it was founded 50 years ago, the diocese has experienced significant growth, now home to 446,500 registered Catholics and over 275 priests. As the community expanded, so did the need for a more user-friendly website that could better serve their community.
Solution
We delivered a full-scale website redesign, transitioning from the Ektron content management system (CMS) to the more flexible, modern, and user-friendly WordPress content management platform. This web project involved not only content migration but also significantly enhancing the website’s functionality with new content, new navigation, and the latest interactive features for both website visitors and website admins. We leveraged the powerful WordPress plugin, Elementor, for example, to create advanced landing pages, ensuring that the site was both visually engaging and easy to navigate while providing the latest in content management.
Website Design & Vision
We designed a clean, modern layout that is informative and elegant. To reflect the diocese’s active and vibrant community, we featured dynamic video throughout, showcasing a variety of people and activities that bring the diocese and website to life. We designed quick links on the homepage using icons, which facilitates easy access to essential information commonly requested. We introduced a simplified footer design, making it easier for users to find key resources quickly too. A comprehensive parish and mass finder was developed, enabling visitors to effortlessly locate parishes and view mass schedules, which enhanced the overall user experience for those wishing to attend Mass around the diocese.
Development & Hosting
We selected WordPress as the foundation for the Arlington Diocese’s new website due to its intuitive administrative content-editing interface and powerful content management capabilities. As an integrated full-service digital agency, our development and hosting teams worked in close collaboration to ensure a seamless transition to the new platform prioritizing both security and performance while reorganizing and migrating content from dynamically generated pages in the prior CMS.
Additionally, the website now features a multi-language function, enabling access for the non-English-speaking community, further extending the diocese’s outreach and inclusivity.
Collaboration
Throughout the project, close collaboration with the Arlington Diocese team was maintained, ensuring that every aspect of the website redesign aligned with their vision. Our partnership included several online and in-person WordPress training sessions for more than forty content contributors. These sessions empowered the diocese’s staff with the knowledge and skills necessary to manage and update the website independently, ensuring long-term success.
Ongoing Support
Our relationship with the Arlington Diocese continues beyond the website’s launch. We provide ongoing support, including enhancements to their newspaper, the Arlington Catholic Herald, where we’ve made significant upgrades to search functionality, ad management, homepage layout rotation, and more. We stay committed to ensuring that the diocese’s websites evolve as dynamic online communication venues to meet the changing needs of its vibrant, growing community of the faithful.
