A parish website its own volunteers can run

The brief

St. Stephen Orthodox Church in Rancho Cordova, California had a website on someone else's platform: a template that was slow, hard to update, and not on a domain the parish controlled. The text on it mattered. Years of carefully written pages about the parish, its patron saint, its clergy and its faith needed to survive the move word for word.

What we did

• Design system first. A brand kit in Claude Design captured the parish's Byzantine red, navy and gold, its serif display type, and the square-cornered, gold-ruled layout language, then became tokens and components in code.
• Every page preserved. Old content was extracted verbatim into Markdown files with the source URL recorded, so the parish council reviews its own words, not a rewrite.
• One file of facts. Service times, addresses, giving links and calendar ids live in a single file that any volunteer can edit.
• A contact form that actually emails the parish, a daily readings panel computed in Pacific time, giving cards for Zelle, PayPal and Venmo verified against the real accounts, and redirects from every old URL.
• Owned end to end. Domain at the parish's registrar, repository in the parish's GitHub, hosting on Vercel under the parish's account.

The result

A site that loads in under a second, scores in the 90s on Lighthouse, and is maintained by one volunteer with a review-and-approve loop: changes go to a preview link first, the council says yes, then they go live.