Challenges faced

The Sisters of Providence are a congregation of religious sisters (nuns) who surprisingly have had an online presence since 1996! In the last few decades, their website has changed several times but mostly kept growing into a Frankenstein-like web of complexity and content. They had literally thousands of pages, a dozen “subsites,” and lots of trouble having their website reflect the relevance of their active, dynamic organization or their beautiful, woodland home. They knew that their users had trouble finding things and that the website used words and structures that made sense to organization insiders, but not to the outside public. The marketing team also was looking forward to the opportunity to bring their site visually up to date and in line with current best practices and a user-friendly approach.

Our solutions

We started with a full content audit of their site. Working with their team, Christina helped them delete hundreds of outdated or no-longer-useful posts from their site. Then we took a strategic, thoughtful look at their existing site architecture. We helped them eliminate 75% of their pages, combining and re-organizing the rest to be simpler, clearer, and more user-focused. At every step of the way, we made sure to set up redirects and take steps to ensure that there would not be any negative effects in search engine traffic.

After the bulk of the content strategy work, we designed them a fresh, vibrant new visual system. They have the good fortune to be located in a beautiful tree-filled patch of Indiana and even have “of-the-Woods” in their name, so we embraced the Woods to generate a bright, natural color palette full of greens and blues that could complement and expand their existing brand. Then we built a design system that could grow and adapt to any type of content they needed, including beautiful full-width landing pages with feeds and testimonials, interior pages with clear navigation ability, up-to-date blog posts, event calendars and even a fully searchable database of inspirational quotes.