800 years of history come alive with an award-winning experience

Our Client

St. Patrick’s Cathedral is Dublin’s second most popular tourist attraction.

It is a place of huge historical significance, worship, events and education with a highly active community. The cathedral’s digital presence was dated and unresponsive and with the help of Board Failte a tender was drawn up to redevelop a new website.

Following a competitive pitch process Friday took the opportunity to create something truly special for this iconic Irish building.

This project has gone on to win and be nominated for a number of prestigious awards.

The Challenge

Information Architecture & UX

  1. Increase online visitor ticket sales.
  2. Communicate the life and activity in the Cathedral visually through photography and video.
  3. Provide dynamic information on all cathedral services and events.
  4. Create a simple and deep information architecture for their vast archive of content.

Our greatest challenge was to understand the complex structure of site content and develop an information architecture and user experience that would work for the main 4 main user groups – visitors, clergy, congregation and researchers. It wasn’t as simple as splitting the site into 4 sections as a lot of content crossed over the 4 user groups.

The Solution

Close collaboration with the cathedral team allowed us to develop a deep understanding of their community. A number of content workshops helped us develop a very simple top level Information Architecture that would cover 95% of the website visitor goals.

Worship Visit Learn

User experience was always going to be mobile first and we looked at how users interacted with mobile websites and questioned some conventions. For example: why the mobile menu button was usually placed on top of the screen where it was hard to reach when using a smartphone with one hand. This resulted in us placing it at the bottom of the screen much to the delight of the users we tested it on.

The Results

User feedback

Hugely positive, the new website gained a lot of attention.

Ticket Sales

Increased by over 146% in the first 3 months.

User stats

Users spent 48% more time on the new website viewing 80% more pages. Bounce rate dropped by 48%.

IIA Awards

Winner of best Website – Most joyous 
to look at and splendid to use.

Eir Spider Awards

Best in Travel, Sport, 
Leisure and Tourism.

Irish Web Awards

Shortlisted: Best Arts and Culture 
Most Beautiful Site.

"Friday really delivered. They met and exceeded our requirements in each and every area, on budget and on time. They are a pleasure to engage with and we will be working with them long into the future."

Gavan Woods, Cathedral Administrator

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