St. Chavara Mission

St. Chavara Syro-Malabar Catholic Church is a parish of the St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Diocese of Chicago, serving a community in Bakersfield. Its site lived on Google Sites: everything a parishioner needed was technically there, buried in a template that belonged to no one.

I rebuilt it in Next.js. The constraint I set was that the migration had to be lossless — every page, every URL and every word of parish copy carried across unchanged — so nobody lost a bookmark and no committee had to re-approve a paragraph. The change is entirely in the presentation.

The design comes out of the parish itself. The palette is lifted from the parish seal: warm umber, parchment, antique gold, with a liturgical crimson held back for feasts and in-memoriam notices. The arch shape from the seal, the sanctuary niches and the church facade frames every portrait and feature image, and the Mar Thoma Sliva is drawn as SVG for dividers and watermarks.

Then there is the part that keeps it alive after launch. A Share News button on every page lets a parishioner send an announcement, event, photo or correction straight from the site — validated, rate-limited and spam-screened, filed as a labelled GitHub issue for review. Nothing publishes itself, and nobody needs a CMS login to contribute.