St. Paul’s Richmond: translating a historic church into a modern digital system.

The challenge

St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond carries unusual historical weight: a downtown Episcopal congregation founded in 1845, listed on both the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, with a story that includes architecture, worship, civic history, reconciliation work, and ongoing community life.

The website needed to feel appropriate to that traditional and elegant setting, but it also had to work like a modern communications system. The public experience had to honor the church’s history while helping people quickly find worship details, events, ministries, formation opportunities, giving pathways, and practical next steps.

What had to come together

• A redesigned WordPress and Divi site with an elegant public presence for a historic downtown church.
• Historical storytelling that gives visitors a way to understand the church’s significance and ongoing reconciliation work.
• A list-first events system, because most churches need a scannable stream of what is coming up more than a traditional 30-day calendar spread.
• Event categories and levels of importance so different kinds of events can be organized without overwhelming the homepage.
• A featured-events homepage pattern, so only selected events surface prominently while the full event system remains available deeper in the site.
• Custom form and payment workflows for recurring operational needs, including Lenten lunch reservations.
• A Google Sheet workflow for the kitchen so meal orders could update continuously and the team could prepare enough food each week.

The design and publishing approach

For St. Paul’s, the event experience became one of the clearest examples of practical design thinking. A monthly grid can look familiar, but it often makes church events harder to scan. The better pattern was a running list: dates, titles, descriptions, featured status, and images in a format people can read quickly.

That same thinking shaped the rest of the site. The public design carries a traditional, elegant atmosphere, while the underlying systems help staff and ministry leaders publish events, promote featured items, handle registrations, accept payments, and move operational data where it needs to go.

The system outcome

St. Paul’s became a strong example of translating a historic church environment into a cutting-edge website without making the technology feel cold or disconnected. The site does public storytelling, ministry navigation, event promotion, and operational support in one place.

The ongoing relationship matters here: the site keeps supporting seasonal communications, events, forms, and operational workflows rather than sitting as a finished brochure.