Challenge:

St. Michael’s Catholic School and St. Michael’s Catholic Church are Ackmann & Dickenson’s first pro bono client. They asked our team to a create content-manageable websites that serve both the school and the church as separate entities under the same roof, so-to-speak. They wanted an evident, strong relationship between the two sites; however, the sites have different audiences, and it was important that they maintain their own, separate identities for this reason. Likewise, their sites needed to be scaled back in navigation, refreshed for content and reorganized for usability.

Targeted opportunities:

• Create information architecture for both the school site and the church site that allows easy access to the most updated information
• Develop a solution to bring together the church site and the school site so as to show that the sites are related – but still two separate and distinct web presences
• Create templated designs that allow easily updatable content by respective staff at the church and school

Approach:

We started by working collaboratively with church and school staff to organize their content into navigation items that would appeal to their different audiences. Then we created designs that are very similar in palette and styling, but clearly separate and distinct. We placed a toggle in the main navigation that allows users to travel between the two sites with ease. The church shows weekly updated content on the home page as a feature. The school has several paths into the site, appealing to both prospective student families, as well as current students and their families. The site is created on the WordPress platform – so as to allow church or school staff to update the site as needed.

Outcome:

St. Michael’s Catholic School and St. Michael’s Catholic Church sites launched in July 2010.