Maintained · October – December 2024
Holy Martyrs of Vietnam Parish
I rebuilt the parish website so non-technical staff can run it and visitors can read it in Vietnamese and English.
Overview
The parish website shares mass schedules, parish news and programs for spiritual growth with the Vietnamese Catholic community.
Parishioners use it for mass times, news and programs. Staff and priests post announcements and update pages themselves. Visitors, newcomers and people who do not speak Vietnamese can read it too.
Holy Martyrs of Vietnam Parish was founded in 1997. Its old Joomla and PHP site was only in Vietnamese and looked dated. Staff without technical skills found it hard to update, and people who did not speak Vietnamese could not read it.
I am a parishioner. I rebuilt the site on my own so it works for Vietnamese Americans and for everyone else.
Goals
The new site needed:
- A CMS that non-technical staff can use.
- A way to post parish announcements.
- A responsive, accessible design in more than one language.
- A modern, welcoming look.
How I built it
I chose WordPress because it is easy to use and popular. This was my first public website, so I wanted tools that were easy to build on.
I set up the CMS for files, forms, posts and announcements. I added Google Maps and Calendar and a language switcher. I checked the design against modern usability standards.
What I learned
It was harder than I expected. Accessibility and device compatibility took the most work, and I had to plan for them from the start.
I learned how to set up SSL, deploy and host a site, and gather requirements from priests and parishioners.
Next time I would use Astro with a headless CMS like Directus. I would have more control over the code.