The National Catholic Bioethics Center had a 15-year-old website built in Concrete5. It was trying to be all things to all people: breaking news, white papers, event registrations, classes, ecommerce, resource libraries, podcast, public policy statements, donations and development, subscriptions, and membership.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, this bioethics center needed to issue guidance quickly and reliably to Catholic health care providers across the United States (and beyond). How should ventilators be rationed? What constituted ethical vaccine development? What are the ethical considerations of shutdown and stay-at-home orders? The old site was simply too cumbersome to respond quickly and nimbly.

So we strapped a new COVID-19 section onto the storefront we had just built, to begin providing rapid-response COVID-19 guidance from NCBC ethicists and other partners and resources.

The new section worked so well that we spent the entire second quarter of 2020 migrating the entire site over. All of it. Membership. Subscriptions. Resource libraries. Public policy sections. The NCBC’s podcast. ALL OF IT.

Through extensive consultation with different departments at the NCBC, I integrated

• membership and subscriptions paywalls via Memberspace

• event registration platforms via RegFox

• class signups, plus paywalled education sections via Memberspace

• podcasts via SoundCloud

• a blog of breaking news and media appearances

• a blog of statements, resources, and white papers

• a calendar of upcoming appearances

• donations buttons and calls to action throughout the site

• a new storefront, which brought the NCBC’s ecommerce into the 2020s