The digital media portal
by Einhard Verlag
Einhard Verlag has been publishing the Kirchenzeitung in the Diocese of Aachen for around 80 years. With the media portal „glaubste!?", religious, social, and spiritual content is made digitally accessible to a broad readership. Features, interviews, profiles, and stories give the digital platform a distinctive character. The standard of quality remains high. The aim is to give readers different perspectives, surprising angles, and constructive information.
Einhard Verlag goes digital
For around 80 years, Einhard Verlag has stood for the KirchenZeitung, the church newspaper for the Diocese of Aachen. With the media portal „glaubste!?", the publisher brings that editorial expertise into a modern digital home. Instead of thinking of journalism in print alone, an independent online platform emerges, presenting reports, interviews and news from church life in a contemporary, easily discoverable form.
The portal follows the principle of quality over quantity. The plan is a manageable, reliable publishing rhythm of roughly one news item every one to two days, drawing on content from the past two years and complemented by background material from the Catholic News Agency (KNA). From the outset, one thing was clear for the editorial team: content has to be quick to create, reliable to find again and accessible to everyone.
Einhard Verlag x 3m5.
For the implementation, Einhard Verlag brought the agency 3m5. on board as an experienced Neos partner. The publisher was looking for an agency that would not just deliver a website, but design a sustainable editorial platform and support the editorial team along the way. From requirements analysis through design to training, the media portal was developed in close, iterative collaboration between the publisher and the agency.
A deliberate part of the project was creating an independent visual identity. The design was developed largely on the side of the Diocese of Aachen, with 3m5. providing advisory support and assisting with implementation. This gave the media portal its own visual language and typography, along with a clear, blue-toned color concept described in client feedback as focused, easy to read, and appealing. As a result, „glaubste!?" stands on its own as a media brand.
To ensure the platform works in everyday practice, enabling the editorial team was a core part of the project. 3m5. conducted hands-on editor training and provided an accompanying editor's handbook that explains day-to-day work in the CMS step by step, from the interface to creating articles to the more demanding hero teasers. Editors can publish their own content and thereby retain full control.
The media portal was designed throughout to meet WCAG 2.1 AA conformance. Accessibility is not a final checkpoint here, but is built into the design, editorial tools, and training. For hero teasers, for example, a fixed overlay behind the headlines is specified so that text remains legible against any background image. The backend flags missing image descriptions, and the editorial team works to clear guidelines on contrast and alt text. This keeps accessibility intact even during day-to-day editorial operations.
Teaser Automation
Maintain once, consistent everywhere
Article teasers are not created individually; they are populated automatically from the article's page properties. The editorial team maintains the title, subline and image in one place, and the article then appears correctly and uniformly in every list and teaser.
Hero Teaser
Creative freedom as an eye-catcher
The hero teaser is the visual centrepiece of the portal. Deliberately built without a slider, it allows variable image formats and free text positioning. The editorial team shapes the first impression of a page flexibly, without being forced into a rigid grid.
Guided Structure
Page types that prevent errors
The system only allows the appropriate page types at each position in the page tree. Articles, for instance, are always created beneath a category page. This keeps the portal's structure consistent and guides the editorial team safely through creating new content.
AI Support
Alt texts and easy language
An AI plugin supports the editorial team with recurring tasks, such as generating alternative texts for images, including several images at once. In addition, content can be provided in easy language and thus opened up to a broader audience.
Marliese Kalthoff
Managing Director, Einhard Verlag
About the Agency
For more than 20 years, 3m5. has accompanied companies in their digitalisation and is now one of the technology leaders in the digital economy. The web engineers specialise in CMS systems, mobile applications, e-commerce and social media.
The broad customer base includes global market leaders and major retail brands such as BMW, ZDF, Ravensburger, Gardena, BASF and Vodafone. 3m5. supports the further development of Neos CMS as Diamond Longtime Supporter.
