Case study ยท Large diocesan rebuild
The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia: rebuilding a historic diocese into a usable communications system.
A large-scale WordPress and Divi overhaul for one of the oldest and largest Episcopal dioceses, with hundreds of files, archives, ministries, churches, clergy, and staff workflows to organize.
The challenge
The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia project was similar in spirit to Atlanta, but larger in content complexity. The redesign had to move hundreds of PDF files, archives, staff-facing resources, ministry pages, church information, news content, and long-running diocesan material into a structure people could still navigate.
This was not simply a visual refresh. It was a content migration, information architecture, publishing workflow, and organizational systems project for a historic diocese with a large staff and some of the largest churches in the Episcopal Church.
What had to come together
- A redesigned WordPress and Divi site with a cleaner structure for a large diocesan audience.
- Migration and reorganization of hundreds of PDFs, archives, resources, and legacy pages.
- A Church Finder tool serving 181 churches across a large geographic footprint.
- The Clergy Connect system for clergy-facing information and relationship management.
- The Beloved Review plugin so several dozen staff members can collaborate around content review.
- Multiple news columns and story treatments for different kinds of diocesan communication.
- Dedicated ministry areas, including the Pathways to Prayer and Practice initiative.
The design and publishing approach
For a diocese this large, the site needed to support many different kinds of visitors: church members, clergy, diocesan staff, seekers, media, parish administrators, ministry leaders, and people looking for documents or historical material.
The design work focused on making the public site easier to navigate while giving internal teams better ways to keep content accurate. The news structure allows stories, updates, ministry content, and archival material to coexist without forcing everything into one generic page pattern.
The system outcome
The result is a communications platform for a large diocesan organization: a public website, archive, staff publishing surface, church directory, clergy system, review workflow, and ministry hub working together. The site gives the communications team room to publish timely stories while preserving access to the deeper institutional material people still need.
This also continues as retainer work: communications consulting, site stewardship, content workflow refinement, and practical improvements as staff needs shift.
What changed
The site became a more durable operating system for diocesan communication.
PDFs, resources, legacy material, and institutional content were moved into a structure designed for retrieval, not just storage.
The Beloved Review plugin supports content collaboration and review for a large staff interacting around the same site.
Dedicated areas like Pathways can function as focused ministry hubs while still belonging to the larger diocesan site.
Screenshots
A few surfaces from the larger system.
Need a complex site to feel simpler?
Start with a clarity review. We will look at the content, the navigation, the publishing workflow, and the tools behind the public experience.