Why we made SimpleParish
Because people asked for it!
Until now, the options for parish websites have fallen roughly into two camps – cookie-cutter template sites with a clunky back-end that are frustrating for people to use, or custom sites in a significantly higher budget range. We've made a number of parish sites in the latter category through our agency, Highland. Over the past couple of years, we had a steady stream of parishes see a site that we had done and ask us if we could do something similar for their parish.
Rather than designing a completely custom site each time – which comes with a significantly higher-price tag and is a longer process for our clients – we refined what we were already doing for parishes into the most useful, basic structure so that the most essential features in our sites could be replicated and therefore be more accessible to more parishes. Then we created lots of ways to customize beyond that basic structure. Two years of development and strategy later, we launched SimpleParish.
Principles
Our agency is guided by principles that have evolved out of our own unique personality and our years of experience working in the Catholic world. As a subset of that, there are a few touchstones that are core to SimpleParish, how we've built it, and where it's going:
- Pragmatic, cautious, realistic. There are a lot of different solutions being offered to parishes – many of them claiming to solve all of your problems, make everything else you use redundant, and bring you a cup of tea and a biscuit while they're at it. SimpleParish isn't that. It's a very good parish website, with nothing unnecessary tacked on, and no pretensions to revolutionize your universe. It’s simple to use and update, and it looks nice.
- Here to last. Our goal is to have SimpleParish grow and improve in a stable, sustainable way for many years to come. There are no middlemen in our org-chart.
- High quality, incremental growth. Every decision we make with SimpleParish is carefully considered for the long-term. As part of our initial build process, we looked back at parish sites we'd built over many years and took stock of what still made sense, what hadn't worked so well, and what was actually getting used by parishes. Needs change – and we'll adapt to meet them.
- Rock solid. SimpleParish is built on proven technology and on a stable foundation with redundancy in mind, which means our sites load quickly and can handle lots of web-traffic with ease.
