Almost a decade ago, one of the very first projects to bear the Highland mark launched – the Sacred Heart Major Seminary website.
Looking back over the years since – at some of the real and lasting friendships that arose through our working relationship with the people of the Seminary – I realize that experience was pivotal in forming one of the most central backbones of our philosophy at Highland. It made it clear to me how effective, life-giving, and game-changing long-lasting mutual relationships can be in this setting.
The tendency is for agencies to function like a sort of digital combine harvester. They rumble across the landscape, looking very shiny, making a lot of noise. They engulf the plants (many at a time!) with sound and fury. They beat the plants mercilessly until all of the seeds are detached and collected.
They move on.
Many agencies never experience the relational model because they're structured in such a way that it simply doesn't seem possible. I'm grateful that working with Sacred Heart, and many other clients over the years with whom we've also built relationships, has taught me that not only is it possible and preferable to function that way – it's actually much more sustainable.
The discovery process aims to put you on the same page as the client. When you have such a long relationship with a client that you can short circuit the whole process – when you've been on that page for years – you have room and empowerment to take projects a step further together.
What a gift to be able to rebuild the Sacred Heart website anew after all this time.
In this project, we knew right away the major win we could achieve – upgrading the back end of the site from Drupal to Craft CMS. Technology moves fast, and the editing experience that a Craft CMS site gives over some older CMSes makes a project worthwhile out of the gate.
Now Sacred Heart can create pages faster, infinitely easier, and with a range of flexibility and options that just wasn't possible before.
We rebuilt the navigation architecture to better reflect how prospective seminarians actually explore the site, improved mobile performance across the board, and gave the photography room to breathe.
Whilst the Sacred Heart site is a site that looked pretty good – the new site is cleaner, smoother, and better designed. The seminary now has a platform that can grow with them for the next decade.
