The old website and everything on it
Let's start with what the problem actually was, because it wasn't the design.
The website was built in Joomla, on a template bought in the middle of the last decade. That same installation lost support back in 2023 and has had no security patches since. The website still worked, but it worked on foundations nobody maintains any more.
The second part of the problem was the content. More than 800 articles, the photos with them and every issue of the parish newsletter. That's the digital archive of a community, collected over years, and not something you can afford to lose along the way.
Why we archived instead of migrating
Here we made a decision that saved both time and nerves.
Extracting more than 800 articles from Joomla, with images and links pointing to one another, could have been done. It would have taken a long time, and the result would have been an archive copied into a new system with errors discovered only months later.
Instead, we left the old website exactly as it is and moved it to the subdomain arhiva.zupacerin.info. It works as before, every old article and every old photo is still there, and anyone looking for something from five years ago will find it in the same place and in the same form.
We built the new website from scratch at the main address zupacerin.info.
We also kept the old addresses working. A link to an article from 2019 sitting in an old Facebook post or in Google's results still opens that article today, just at its new location. Nobody ends up on an empty page.
What we built
The new website covers what people come to it for.
Announcements and articles, the parish newsletter archive, a page for each of the seven communities and each of the four churches in the parish, the process for each sacrament, the Mass schedule, a gallery, the parish history and the parish staff.
That's a lot of content for one website. It was organised together with the parish media team, who knew what belonged where better than we could ever have guessed on our own.
A Mass schedule that changes by itself
The parish's summer Mass schedule applies through July and August, and the regular one applies for the rest of the year.
We made the website switch on its own. On the first of July it shows the summer schedule, on the first of September it goes back to the regular one. Nobody has to remember it or change it by hand. Anyone who still wants to see the other one will find both on the page, one click apart.
This is a small thing nobody notices when it works. It gets noticed when it doesn't, when someone turns up for Mass at the wrong time.
A parish newsletter you don't have to download
Glasnik sv. Stjepana, the parish newsletter, is the most requested part of the website, especially among parishioners living abroad.
So it opens within the website itself, in an embedded viewer. Anyone who wants to can still download it or open it in a new window, but for ordinary reading nothing needs downloading.
An admin panel for the media team
A website that can't be updated by its owners is dead after the first year.
So alongside the website we built an admin panel where the parish media team publishes on its own. A new article, a new issue of the newsletter, new photos in the gallery: it all goes through the panel, with no programming knowledge and without us.
That was the goal. An agency that has to be called every time the Sunday announcements need publishing hasn't solved the problem, it has renamed it.
Here, simplicity was a requirement, not a style
Very different people open a parish website.
Someone is looking for the Sunday Mass time and needs an answer in two clicks. Someone is reading the parish newsletter from Germany. Someone is checking which documents are needed for a baptism. Among them are people who don't use a computer every day.
So the interface is deliberately reduced to a minimum. There's no step that leads nowhere and no menu you have to find your way around. Here, simplicity isn't an aesthetic choice but a condition for the website to serve the people it's meant for at all.
The same address, with the archive right next to it
The new website stayed at zupacerin.info, and the old one is available at arhiva.zupacerin.info.
The address people already know still takes them where they're used to going, and a link to the archive sits in the footer of every page. Nobody has to relearn anything.
Want the same for your brand?
We thank Čerin Parish for trusting us with such a big project, and we look forward to continuing our work together.
If your parish, company or association has an outdated website that needs renewing, get in touch through the contact form, by phone or on any of our social media channels. We take on the challenge whatever the size.
Let us start the evolution of your online presence.
