The Diocese of Bangor

The Diocese of Bangor were evolving. A new communications strategy, along with a brand refresh was moving them to make important decisions about how they told their story and communicated with the communities around them. An important building block in that strategy was the digital world. A new kind of tool was needed, so they turned to us.

Starting with a discovery workshop, we spent a day in Bangor with a group of key stakeholders, taking time to understand their shape, their requirements and , most importantly, the needs of their users.

High on the list of topics we unpacked was content flexibility, and hand-in-hand with that: the need for full bilingual support, everywhere. Keeping a site up-to-date can often make or break a project, and so we needed to ensure that the tools we delivered worked for administrators of the site. Given the needs of the users and the desire to actively encourage the use of the Welsh language, a simultaneous parallel approach was settled on. This is common in print media, but almost unheard-of online. This represented both a design challenge, and a developmental one. Ensuring that the content flowed and made logical sense, particularly when factoring for fluid device support, was a challenge that we thoroughly enjoyed grappling with.

An additional facet of the project was about enabling multiple instances of the site, set up for the Diocese’s ministry areas, could share information between themselves without the need for duplication. We therefore built an API framework that allowed the network of sites to subscribe to each other's news, events, resources and vacancies, whilst retaining the selective control over what content was presented.

The Diocese now has a digital platform which will take them confidently into the next stage of its life, and it’s our privilege to support them into it.