Why did the Diocese of London need a website redesign? The good people within the diocese were doing great work, but their light was being hidden under a bushel.
The Diocese needed a better platform so that this valuable work could become better known and also to achieve the goals of Capital Vision 2020.
A secondary objective was to improve the quality and breadth of support information for parishes. The plan here was to make members of staff curators for the web content that related to their business areas. This would make it easier to adapt to a web-first publishing model.
To achieve all this, the Diocese of London put their faith in Moove Agency.
The Diocese of London's new web presence needed to wear several different mitres (that's a bishop's hat, by the way):
So that's one website, several audiences. Just to recap:
At Moove, it's all about you and your input. We kick off with a stage called wireframing/prototyping, but only after productive and insightful discussions with you over coffee and croissants.
We'll talk about content, page structure and calls to actions. Interactive prototypes allow us to do this with amazing clarity and effectiveness.
These days, it's all about surfing on the run, so we had to build the best-possible viewing experience for mobiles and tablets. We worked extra hard to use a responsive framework and get a consistent experience for every possible device.
Yikes. This was a high-pressure, multi-user site. It was the perfect opportunity to push our internal guidelines and quality standards to the next level. We created a beautiful web style guide to help both developers and the client's in-house web team. They'll use the web style guide like designers use brand guidelines.
Dare we say it, the Bible of development.
Who needs a printed yearbook? This is 2015, right? The directory feature brings together content types and functions to create an easily navigable and searchable source of contact information for people and places within the Diocese. It replaced the 200-page yearbook.
We introduced complex data structures, such as the entire database of thousands of contacts within the Diocese (on the directory section). This is searchable by keyword or postcode and synched daily with a third-party CRM system.
The challenge was to allow WordPress admins to create groups of widgets and update individual widgets globally. WordPress comes with a default widget system. But that's not enough, because default settings don't allow you to modify widgets globally or create groups of widgets.
We needed WordPress admins to be able to create a group of widgets usable on multiple templates with global settings for every widget. By default, the WordPress widget system allows you to create only one widget and assign it to a particular sidebar. Use this widget on ten sidebars and modify it later and you'll have to modify it ten times. If you have dozens of sidebars? Forget it.
It was time to become WordPress superheroes and be the architects of a new widget system. This one took our WordPress development skills to yet another level.
The Diocese has hundreds of categorised articles online, but in a separate taxonomy to the news/blog articles. They're used primarily for the clergy and parish officers' audience. The Diocese site had to build in a review process for these articles – a system that flags articles due for review and notifies the owner by email.
The old website was a mine of old news articles. Not for the faint-hearted, and nothing that could be done manually. Our development teams worked closely with the client to map categories from old to new and then created a custom script to import old data into the new WordPress system.
Super-fast speed and load times can propel you up the Google escalator. They also sit well with impatient users.
That's why we optimise our websites to achieve the highest-possible speed-loading score.
We implemented all this:
“We were very impressed with Moove's presentation and enthusiasm for the project. They showed a true understanding of our needs and a real commitment to the vision we want to achieve with this project. ”
