📖 Overview

My pastor recently asked me to take over the management and development of the website for Living Waters Independent Baptist Church. I saw this as a great opportunity to use my technical skillset to serve the church and improve our online presence.

By rebuilding the site from scratch, I was able to modernize the design while ensuring the platform serves as a helpful resource for both our current members and folks in our community looking for a church home.

🚀 Project Goals

• Update Site Details: My primary goal was to refresh the website with current information. I wanted to create a system that makes it much easier to keep our service times, events, and announcements up to date in the future.
• Decrease Operating Costs: The church was previously using a Wix site that cost over $300 per year. By migrating to my current tech stack, I was able to bring that cost down to $0 (outside of the domain name) by leveraging static hosting.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Framework: Astro (Static Site Generation) — I chose Astro to ensure the site is incredibly fast and lightweight.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS — This allowed me to build a custom, responsive design that looks great on both desktop and mobile devices.
• Deployment: Netlify — The site is hosted on Netlify with CI/CD integration, meaning the site automatically updates every time I push a change to the repository.
• Content: Markdown-driven Data Collections — I used Astro’s content collections to manage our data. This makes it easy to organize things like church history, ministry details, and upcoming events without needing a complex database.

⛪ Impact

This project allowed me to bridge the gap between modern web development and local ministry. The church now has a faster, more reliable website that is completely free to host, allowing us to steward our resources more effectively.