Stanley Avenue Church of Christ

The minister at Stanley Avenue is my dad. I’ve built things for him before, smaller and scrappier, but this one I wanted to do properly. The site he had was a free template that fought him every time he tried to update it. He’d tried WordPress before that, and Wix. The WYSIWYG editors helped, but the underlying system never bent the right way for how a church staff thinks about its own week.

The public site has what a church actually needs online: a sermons archive, a blog, ministry pages, announcements, and an events calendar. Fast on phones, fast on slow connections, no plugins to break.

The admin is the half most church sites get wrong. This one has separate areas for sermons, events, announcements, ministries, blog posts, and site-wide settings, built around the way a church staff thinks about its own week. A scripture picker pulls verses directly from the Christian Standard, NKJV, and NIV translations. Service times have their own widget. Recurring events handle themselves. Sermon videos drop in from YouTube.

The site runs on infrastructure built for real traffic, not a shared web host that goes down on a Sunday morning. The branding matches the church. Search engines find it. Every part of it is owned by the church, not rented from a platform.

The hardest thing to get right was the admin. I wanted it to look professional, feel modern, and be the kind of thing church staff would enjoy using — and the first approach (a static site with a separate editor) couldn’t get me there. Every change felt like more friction than the change deserved. I tore it all out and rebuilt the entire site, public side and admin both, on a different platform — one designed around the editor experience I had in my head.

I’m still working on it. There are things I want it to do that it doesn’t yet, but it’s already a much better product than what I started with.

The first time I watched my dad sit down and post a blog post, I knew it had worked: upload the picture, pick the categories and tags, drop in scripture references with the custom widget, write the body, hit publish. He didn’t need help with any of it. With the WordPress and Wix setups he’d used before, he’d end up calling whoever set it up every time something needed to change. With this one he didn’t need to call me. He logs in at least twice a week, publishing blog posts, managing sermon entries, posting announcements, and adding events as they come up.

That’s what matters on a church website. The day-to-day editor has to use the admin without thinking about it. The system has to get out of the way. If it doesn’t pass that test, the public side doesn’t matter. The site goes stale, announcements don’t get posted, events stay outdated, and within six months everyone forgets it’s there.