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Archdiocese of Saint Louis redesigns website (still running Drupal)

Submitted by Jeff Geerling on Thu, 12/15/2011 - 11:55am
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I used to work in the Archdiocese of St. Louis as the director of Web Development, so archstl.org (and other online Archdiocesan properties) are near and dear to my heart. I spent countless hours merging some 49 Joomla websites into the Drupal install that (still) runs archstl.org, and besides a bunch of database heavy lifting that was outsourced, I bled over almost every feature on the site (I've chronicled many experiences on this site in the past).

Archdiocese of St. Louis archstl.org redesign - blue

So, I'm very happy to see that the Archdiocese has continued to develop and improve the site. This new design has a more modern and 'edgy' feel, and is the first redesign to involve more theming and work on the 'View' of the website rather than a complete rearchitecting of the database, filesystem, etc.—which is awesome!

I wish other Catholic organizations I've worked with were in the position of not having to scrap their website and redesign from scratch every few years... I've seen too many projects where an organization will spend thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, and end up with a site that's not very future-proof, and will again be scrapped and redesigned for much more $$$ in a few years. Don't be that organization :)

Archdiocese of Saint Louis' Upgraded Website

Submitted by oscatholic on Mon, 02/22/2010 - 6:00am
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In early 2009, it was determined that the Archdiocese of Saint Louis needed to upgrade its website, mostly for security concerns. After investigating a move from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5.x, the Archdiocese determined it would be more cost effective and a more future proof decision to migrate the over 49 individual Joomla sites that comprised www.archstl.org into a single Drupal installation.

Archdiocese of Saint Louis Website Upgrades

This upgrade/migration provides many benefits, not the least of which are a better end-user experience, a better administrative experience, and much improved page load and search indexing performance. In addition, Drupal's structure and content presentation provide much greater flexibility in design and information structure, as well as SEO (search engine optimization) than other popular CMS frameworks that were investigated.

The decision was made early on to partner with a development company that would help with the content migration and initial site buildout. Theming would be done in-house. We chose to partner with Palantir.net, a web development company located in Chicago, IL. After Palantir completed initial site work, I went up to meet them, and also attended my first DrupalCamp (Chicago); Chicago has a much more vibrant Drupal community than St. Louis... but perhaps that will change at some point!

After nearly a year's worth of planning and development, the Archdiocese launched its upgraded website on February 22, 2010. Continue Reading »

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