Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington
Designing a faster, more human path to help.
The Challenge
Catholic Charities serves people in moments of real need. The website plays a critical role in connecting individuals and families to services and supporters to opportunities to give. But the existing site, built on Ektron, made that harder than it needed to be. Navigation was complex, mobile use was limited, updates were cumbersome for staff, and accessibility improvements were difficult to implement.
The core question guiding the project became simple and demanding: How can we make it easier and faster for people to get help or give help without getting lost?
Our Approach
We designed and built the new site with a single priority: serve the user first, whether they are seeking assistance, offering support, or managing content internally. Every decision, from information architecture to visual design and CMS selection, was guided by real user needs and real-world constraints. The goal was not simply to modernize the site, but to remove friction at moments that matter most by making pathways clearer, content easier to access, and updates easier to manage. By aligning user experience, accessibility, and staff workflows, the site functions as both a dependable service tool and a sustainable platform that can evolve alongside CCDA’s mission.
Streamlined User Experience & Navigation
The new site architecture is intentionally organized around the two primary user needs: finding help and giving help.
- Immediate pathways: Quick links at the top of the homepage shorten the journey for users who need support, allowing them to reach key resources without searching or scrolling.
- Clear decision points: A prominent “Find Help / Give Help” block—mirroring the site’s main menu structure—appears consistently across pages, reinforcing orientation and choice.
- Consistent information architecture: Navigation, page layouts, and messaging work together to ensure users always know where they are and where to go next. The result is a site where it’s genuinely difficult to get lost.
A More Human, Mission-Driven Design
Catholic Charities’ impact is about people, not pages. The design reflects that.
- Real photography, social content blocks, and mission-forward layouts highlight the individuals, families, staff, and volunteers involved in CCDA’s work.
- The site creates repeated opportunities to see impact in action, reinforcing trust and connection while keeping the focus on service.
Mobile-First and Accessible by Design
Many people seeking help are doing so from a phone, often without access to a desktop computer.
- The new site is fully responsive, delivering a clear, usable experience on mobile devices.
- Accessibility was a priority from the start. The new WordPress platform makes it significantly easier to meet and maintain accessibility standards which is an essential requirement for an organization that serves everyone.
Built for Staff, Not Just Visitors
With a large and distributed team, CCDA needed a system that empowered staff to manage content independently.
- Moving from Ektron to WordPress dramatically simplified content updates.
- Page templates and editing tools were designed with staff workflows in mind, enabling fast, confident updates without technical friction.
The Outcome
The new CCDA website achieves two major goals:
- It streamlines how people find help or give help, reducing friction, confusion, and time to action.
- It moves the organization to a modern, flexible CMS, making the site easier to maintain, more accessible, and more sustainable for the long term.
The result is a site that feels clearer, more human, and more aligned with Catholic Charities’ mission of supporting users at critical moments while giving staff the tools they need to keep the site current and effective.
How we did it.
The cornerstone of your identity is an authentic brand story. We work with you to establish a clearly defined brand strategy for your goals – a strategy complementary to your brand’s visual voice.
The creative we design is heavily influenced by the framework for innovation. We design media not just to please our clients, but to engage and delight their customers, members, or constituents. We put people first.
We’ll help you select the right technology, and code it right. Our development team is passionate about using the right mix of open source, off-the-shelf, and hosted solutions to solve complex problems.
We understand clients have a choice of website hosting providers. Our service goes beyond stability, up time, and more to a personalized approach that meets you where you are today, and prepares you for your tomorrow
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