A new website for Cirencester Parish

We’ve been working with Cirencester Parish for around ten years now, and we’re pleased to have just completed our third website design and build for them.

Over that time, the parish website has evolved alongside the organisation, with an ever-growing amount of information about services, churches, community groups and events to share. The architecture of the site began to fragment, and information wasn’t always where people expected (or wanted) to find it. To help with this, the administrators began creating pages of “frequently accessed pages” to overcome shortcomings in how the website architecture had evolved (or should that be devolved?)

This latest redesign was an opportunity to give the site a fresh look, re-plan the architecture to put all of the new content in the right places, improve the experience for visitors and, just as importantly, make it easier for the parish team to keep everything up to date.

Starting with planning and wireframes

As with most of our website projects, we started with wireframes. These allowed us to work through the page layouts and navigation before getting into the visual design, making sure visitors could find the information they needed without having to hunt for it.

One of the hardest parts was accommodating three distinct audience types – people wanting to attend church for Sunday worship, tourists wanting to visit the building for its history, and people wanting to hire the church for an event (or attend an event).

We drew on our experience with Lydiard Park, who also had separate distinct audience types, and divided the new website into three sections, all easily accessible from the ever-present top navigation and from the homepage.

Once we were happy with the structure, we developed the graphic design and built the new site in WordPress, creating a flexible website that could accommodate the parish’s many different activities and audiences.

Easier updating with a structured Content Management System

A website is only as useful as the information it contains, so we wanted to make maintaining the site as straightforward as possible for the people managing it day to day.

One example is the way events are handled. Rather than relying on someone to remember to remove old listings, dated events can automatically disappear once they’ve passed. It’s a small detail, but it saves time and helps keep the website looking current.

We also made sure that information which people needed frequently was right there on the homepage. An example of this is the parish events calendar (a Google calendar). We used the Google API to read information from the calendar and show the next four happenings right on the homepage. It’s dynamic, always up to date and provides a quick reference point for people who don’t then need to use the navigation to find the calendar in its entirety.

More generally, building the site in WordPress gives the parish team a familiar, flexible content management system, allowing them to update pages and share news without needing to involve a web developer every time something changes. As the old website was also built in WordPress, this was nice continuity.

Another chapter in a long-standing relationship

We’re delighted to have delivered another website for Cirencester Parish. Ten years of working together means we have a good understanding of the organisation and its needs, which helps us make sensible decisions about both the design and the functionality.

The result is a fresh, accessible online home for the parish, with a structure that’s easier for visitors to navigate and tools that make it simpler for the team to keep the content up to date.

You can explore the new website for yourself.

If your website is becoming difficult to manage, or simply needs a refresh, do get in touch with us. We’d be happy to talk through how we could help.