Five things the Vatican must change about its website

The Vatican's current, rather clunky website

Not to be churlish, but as anyone who has visited the Vatican’s official website will know, it’s rather…dated, to say the least. But I have good news! This week it was announced that the Vatican is at last planning to update vatican.va so it’s more user-friendly.

Here are five things I hope they fix.

1. The design

Good grief. I mean, have you seen it? Compared to the splendour of the Vatican itself, the Holy See’s website is a real embarrassment. Once you get past the homepage, which I’ll admit doesn’t look too bad (until you try to use it, that is), the site is a maze of dodgy formatting and empty, pointless index pages.

The virtual tours aren’t half bad, actually, but they’re led to by some truly awful indexes. And that parchment blackground? It took me right back to the 90s. Not only does it make the text incredibly difficult to read for those with poor eyesight, it’s just plain ugly.

The Vatican should go for a clean, modern look that preserves a sense of grandeur but is much more inviting and accessible, sort of a White House meets former Greek Royal Family.

2. Navigation

How on earth are you meant to find anything? The three navigation “rings” on the homepage seem to duplicate where they don’t contradict each other. Let’s have a clean, simple navigation bar with a decent search function, please.

3. Consistency

Every time you drill down – to information about a library, a basilica or the Pope himself – it’s like you arrive at a completely different website, with a different design and a different navigation system. Can’t we have one big site that works the same wherever you are within it?

4. Architecture

Sounds geeky, but let me explain. You see, at the moment, the Vatican’s website is built up with a number of “static” pages that act like a pile of Word documents. Every time something changes, you have to open the document, make the changes, hit Save, then update all the other bits of the site that referred to the old information. Newer sites (like CatholicHerald.co.uk) run on a database: if you want to change a name, a date or a title, you only need to do it once and in one place – the rest of the site will magically update, reflecting the change you made on every relevant page across the site.

According to Mgr Lucio Adrian Ruiz, head of Internet services for the Vatican, vatican.va has more than half a million pages. It must take ages to make even the most basic changes to a site this large. (Perhaps that goes some of the way to explaining the Vatican’s sluggish press operation? You can hardly blame Mgr Ruiz’s team for sighing at the thought of updating the website.)

5. The design

Yeah, I know design was number one as well, but it really is so ghastly it deserves another mention. People have been imagining what a better site might look like for ages. It really is time for a change.

So will the Vatican come up with the goods? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.