John I. White

Jesuit.ie

The third incarnation - at least

Seemingly following the formula that the agency's own site comes last, this is the the third incarnation - at least - of the Irish Jesuits' Portal site, since I worked for the Jesuits in 2006.

Up until this it was a "when we can get to it approach" via Dreamweaver - but with dynamically generated news from their other main news site.

Technical

Now it's a Joomla site and crammed with high-quality, sticky interactive content:

News feeds, Blogs, Tweets, video, audio and quality well-written articles.

We lost our Developer during the re-development but Joomla still made it possible for two - not especially technical - people to do some exciting things with the site.

Design

From a design point of view this site has always been a challenge stylistically: whether to be old fashioned and venerable looking - or very modern? The former is the common approach internationally, with old manuscripts and wax seals featuring; and the latter modern approach can end up looking too minimalist and sterile. I think we got the balance right - even in the use of typography (we eased back on the serif-faces a little more).