A Catholic website platform rooted in solutions

August 16, 2023 by

Diane Kern

We said bye to difficult-to-manage websites years ago.

The purpose of a church website is to help its community discover information and accomplish tasks. It’s a tool supporting a mission around-the-clock, even when the office is closed.

Catholic organizations don’t often have a budget to spend endless hours managing a website, coding their own updates, or changing content through fields. This is why eCatholic exists. Our founder's dream was to bring a product to church organizations that was inspiring and usable by anyone.

 
a technology that any staff member can take the reins of and create something beautiful.

What is it that made the eCatholic platform stand out and still sets us apart today? Here are the big technology solutions our website product has been providing church organizations for years.

Drag-and-drop content building

Remember the days when website products used a back-end approach to make edits? You’d search endless menus and options, filling out form fields for new content and other preferences. If you forgot to hit the save button each time, you had to start over. And if you weren’t satisfied in preview mode, it was back to endless menus, guessing your way through options or HTML code.

eCatholic was always easier to build, but the release of drag-and-drop modules, including Section Layouts, was a game-changer! Simply make unpublished changes from within your website pages by moving content and seeing how it will actually appear. Your changes are stored as you go, and you can publish them individually or all at once. Like stacking blocks, watch your vision build in front of you.

So long third-party widgets

At one point, widgets all sounded pretty cool, like something from The Jetsons; however, though helpful, they are not completely reliable nor on point with your brand. To be honest, third-party widgets oftentimes just end up being a bit clunky.

eCatholic takes the most sought-after resources by our clients and builds beautiful modules that work within their websites. These modules connect directly to the information sources so that third-party content displays instantly and as part of your website’s design. No longer do weekly Mass readings or church news feeds have to look like something duct taped to a web page.
 

Sharing news from your diocese

Parishes, schools, and ministries receive notifications about diocesan news and events to share with their members all the time. Since diocesan news is worth sharing, eCatholic decided to lessen the work for all parties by creating a better way to get diocesan information to all their parishes.

Working with our earliest diocesan clients, we not only built them stunning custom websites but a direct line for easily sharing content to their member parish, school, and ministry websites as well. These specialized modules* are filled with content created by a diocese that automatically populates when it's added to a parish, school, or ministry site. So now, Catholic organizations can easily use and direct their communities to diocesan news!
 

*Diocesan Sharing modules are only available to website users within a diocese that has partnered with eCatholic. If you are a diocesan employee and are interested in learning more about a partnership with eCatholic and the solutions it provides, drop us a line! Send an email to [email protected] for more details or schedule a time to meet.
 

Church organizations have a lot to share, and details change quickly. Having tools configured to integrate with other resources, or make information more intuitive, is more than icing on the cake. Here are some integrated features and intuitive tools eCatholic offers website users:

1

Calendars that practically promote themselves

All event details are managed from a single listing but can be shown on specified pages and in a variety of displays. Calendar entries can directly link to a flyer, an event page, or an outside source. This way, the Youth Ministry events always show up on the church's main calendar and as events on their ministry page. If something changes, the edits only need to occur in one place for all instances to update.

2

A People Module worth meeting

Knowing who to get in touch with is a must when you are building relationships, attracting participants, and seeking volunteers. eCatholic’s People Module allows a person’s title and contact information to be managed from one location but appear on multiple website pages selected by you.

3

Unforgettable Mass Time™ features

These versatile tools allow Mass information to be entered into your church website and appear in a number of ways. The Mass module neatly displays Mass schedules on any page of your website. The MassTime™ feature enables a button that appears on your homepage for instant access to your Mass schedule and direction details. You use alerts that activate at the start of your weekend Masses so anyone accessing your homepage will immediately see when the next Masses begin.

Learn more: Mass Times™ and Mass Time™ Alerts feature

These are just a small sampling of the technology solutions that have been transforming how Catholic organizations create and manage their church website. And the best part is that it's still the beginning as new solutions will continue to inspire for years to come.