Detroit Catholic, the news service of the Archdiocese of Detroit, has deep roots as the online successor of The Michigan Catholic, a weekly newspaper founded in 1872. We worked with the Archdiocese of Detroit to rebuild the Detroit Catholic site, taking it to the next level and continuing to solidify its place as one of the highest quality sources of Catholic news nationally.

Despite their local focus, the DC team puts out such a consistent, high quality publication that hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe access the site every month. Because the site is so rich in media content, and because individual stories are often picked up by larger publications and generate large traffic spikes, we built a site that employs multiple redundancies and complex caching logic to handle 3+ terabytes of monthly bandwidth.

Behind the scenes, the most complicated part of the project was migration of tens of thousands of articles and photos from two different legacy sources – Wordpress, and another CMS. There are few better experiences for copy editors than Craft CMS, and so using that as the base we developed a custom back-end experience that allowed the DC team to quickly and easily post articles and events, and manage ad spots and automated newsletters that go out to their large audience daily and weekly. To send newsletters we built a custom Hubspot integration, as the Archdiocese already handles the bulk of their communications with donors and constituents within Hubspot.

The Archdiocese has a large Hispanic audience and so the Spanish edition of the site was an important aspect of the project – from the same back end, the DC team can post translated versions of any article, as well as serving content solely for that audience.

Is your diocese or organization interested in improving your online news presence? Drop us a line!