There are now four churches, three hospitals and thirteen Catholic schools in the parish of Ennis. These changes demand the development of new ways to reach out to people.

Parish administrator, Fr Tom Hoan and Michael Byrne of parishwebsites.ie took on this challenge in mid 2009. At this stage, Ennis had been running a website for a long time but parish personnel wanted to reach more people with the site and use it in more effective ways.

Fr. Tom sums up the feeling at the time, “Our site was not fit for the purpose we intended and we were also pretty overwhelmed by the job of maintaining and updating it. Michael scoped out our needs and this got our thinking back on track.”

Parishwebsites.ie built a site based on these discussions.

“We are now getting around 5,000 unique visits each month compared to 300 previously.”

Fr. Tom believes that, as a priest, the new site has helped him greatly in his ministry.