IHM Scranton

Website project

Website content strategy
Brand extension for web
Web design & development

About the organization

The Congregation of Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Scranton, Pennsylvania are a community of Catholic women religious. Sisters minister in the United States and Peru, working in education, social services, non-profit administration, pastoral ministry, and more. They also have a strong dedication to justice, peace, and the integrity of creation. And they are especially proud of being the first congregation of women religious on the web — starting with their first website back in 1995!

Project to-do list

Rethink and redesign their congregation website to reflect the vibrant reality of the community and its ministries in a useful, friendly way
Strategize a home on the web to serve as a central hub, clarifying and uplifting their organization
Expand on existing branding to design a visual brand for the website that the sisters and broader community can feel proud of and represented by
Set IHM Scranton up with a non-proprietary CMS (content management system) that will allow for more versatile and beautiful pages and posts
Ensure that the communications staff will be able to update the site themselves and manage its content easily
Set them up with an easy-to-update events calendar that they can manage themselves
Build a comprehensive database for obituary information that can be displayed in a variety of ways, including archive listings and searchable tables.
Accommodate Spanish-language content for some of the site’s pages and posts.

Project milestone

Content strategy & site architecture

After clarifying our website needs and goals together, we worked with IHM Scranton’s project team to create a comprehensive working list of content on the new site. In particular, we focused on rethinking content as broadly engaging instead of narrowly defined buckets. We strategized the perfect site architecture to hold it all. Then we defined clear categories and tags for post content. This way, posts can appear dynamically throughout the site when relevant — no more deeply buried content! This content strategy work set the stage for a clear, welcoming site that honors and uplifts the congregation’s past, present and future.

Project milestone

Brand extension

We started from the Sisters’ existing teal logo, and expanded this outward with a comprehensive brand extension. The vibrant new color palette incorporates pinks, oranges, yellows and greens along with the teal, for a bright, engaging user experience. At every step, we made sure to allow for accessible color contrast ratios.

Then we chose two web-appropriate typefaces. One heading & body typeface matched IHM Scranton’s bright, modern vibes. And one scripty “flavor” font added a personal feel while hearkening back to some of the sisters’ previous publications and campaigns. Together, these fonts gave a fresh feel to their established identity and ensured full legibility.

IHM's new color palette arranged in a pleasing circle grid — The color palette invigorates the website’s look & feel by adding bright, inspiring warm tones to the Sisters’ teal branding. And a variety of neutrals ties everything together.

Screenshot of IHM Scranton shows bold teals, oranges, and pinks, plus warm neutrals. — The site’s vibrant color palette is instantly engaging. And the sans-serif typeface, with an accent script sprinkled in, makes for a super-readable site.

Project milestone

Site design & development

From the ground up, we built a brand new, full-featured website. We developed pages, posts, events and archives in a modern, accessible design. In particular, we followed the content strategy foundations to choose colors and design elements that are energetic, welcoming, and vibrant.

From full-width thoughtfully designed foundational pages to beautiful-by-default stories, everything looks great on all device widths. And clear main navigation, sectional menus, and breadcrumbs ensure that the visitor never feels lost.

Dynamic story feeds are scattered throughout the site, uplifting the Sisters’ fantastic written content and photographs, both new & old.

The end result is a vibrant website that represents the Sisters of IHM beautifully and authentically — and that provides them an inviting, accessible online home.

View Site

Spotlight on

Advanced tables

The IHM Scranton team had several batches of information that they needed to display in a clear, user-friendly way. So we built them several full-featured tables that can be sorted, filtered, and searched.

The Sisters of IHM share obituaries on their site for all of their deceased members, all the way back to the 1800s! To ensure this data can be found and used, we built a table that pulls in specific custom data from a custom post type. Whenever a new obituary is added, its information is automatically added to the table.

For their ministry locations, the Sisters wanted two tables delineating “Where we serve” and “Where we have served.” We created these tables to integrate with Google Sheets data. Now, the IHM Scranton staff can simply update the corresponding Google sheets, and the data flows seamlessly into the onsite table for browsing, searching, and filtering.