✨ Building KingdomSites: My Journey into Web Development for Faith Communities

👋 Introduction

Welcome to my first deep dive into a personal project: KingdomSites! This project was born out of a desire to combine my growing web development skills with a meaningful purpose – helping faith-based organizations establish a strong online presence.

In this post, I’ll share the journey of building KingdomSites, from conception to deployment, covering the tech stack, challenges, lessons learned, and what I’d do differently next time.

🎯 What I Wanted to Build

My vision for KingdomSites was to create a modern, user-friendly, and comprehensive website template specifically tailored for churches and religious organizations. I aimed for a solution that would be:

• 🎨 Visually Appealing: Clean, contemporary design that reflects the reverence and community spirit of a faith institution.

• 🛠 Feature-Rich: Including essential functionalities like sermon archives (audio/video), event calendars, donation portals, contact forms, and about sections.

• 🧩 Easy to Manage: A structure that could be easily customized and updated, even by those with limited technical knowledge.

• 📱 Responsive: Flawless display across all devices, from desktops to mobile phones.

Essentially, I wanted to provide a solid foundation for churches to connect with their congregations and reach a wider audience online.

🧰 Tech Stack

To bring KingdomSites to life, I leveraged a straightforward yet powerful stack:

• 🧱 HTML5 – For structuring content with semantic markup.

• 🎨 CSS3 – For styling, including responsive design with Flexbox and Grid, plus subtle animations.

• ⚙️ JavaScript (Vanilla JS) – For interactive elements, dynamic content loading, and improving user experience.

• ✨ AOS (Animate On Scroll) – For engaging scroll-triggered animations that make the site feel dynamic.

• 🌟 Font Awesome – For scalable vector icons, adding visual appeal without hurting performance.

I focused on a front-end heavy approach to keep things simple and deployable via static hosting.

🧗‍♂️ Major Challenges I Faced

1. 🔄 Simulating Dynamic Content (Without a Backend)

Without a server-side backend, I had to simulate dynamic sections like Sermons and Events using JavaScript. This required thoughtful structuring of HTML and precise JS logic for smooth and maintainable content updates.

2. 🌀 AOS Integration

While the AOS library made animations easier, tweaking and debugging animations across different devices took a fair bit of trial and error to ensure smooth behavior.

3. 📱 Responsive Layouts

Making the site truly responsive meant carefully crafting CSS breakpoints, using relative units, and testing across multiple screen sizes.

4. 🚧 Designing a Custom 404 Page

Although GitHub Pages handles 404s, I wanted a custom error page that reflected the design language of the site and guided users back to relevant content.

📚 What I Learned

💡 Advanced CSS

I leveled up my responsive design skills using CSS variables, transform, and transition for smooth animations.

🧠 Vanilla JS Mastery

By skipping frameworks, I sharpened my skills in DOM manipulation, event handling, and building modular, reusable code.

🧭 User Experience (UX)

Designing for a non-tech-savvy audience helped me focus on intuitive navigation, clear calls to action, and visual hierarchy.

🗂 Project Organization

Breaking the project into components and planning file structure ahead of time helped a lot with managing complexity.

🔁 What I’d Do Differently

• 🔗 Use a Headless CMS

Tools like Strapi, Sanity, or Netlify CMS would make it easier for non-devs to update content.

• 🧰 Introduce a Build Tool

For better performance and organization, I’d integrate tools like Webpack or Parcel to handle bundling, minification, and more.

• 📂 Modularize JavaScript Further

Splitting JS into separate files like sermons.js, events.js, etc., would help scale the project better.

• ♿ Prioritize Accessibility

While the site is responsive, I’d give more attention to accessibility—like ARIA labels and keyboard navigation—for inclusivity.

🌐 Live Website

🔗 Explore KingdomSites live:

👉 https://senzyenterprises.github.io/KingdomSites/

Feel free to browse, click around, and see the template in action!

🧵 Final Words

Building KingdomSites was a deeply rewarding experience. It pushed me to level up my front-end skills, reinforced the importance of thoughtful design, and gave me a chance to contribute meaningfully to faith communities looking to grow online.

💬 Thanks for reading my journey!

Feel free to drop your thoughts or questions in the comments — I’d love to hear from you.