01 — Client
About the project
A Christian church in Reutlingen: Sunday meetings, prayer meetings, a Bible circle, conferences across Germany. The site is run by church members, not developers, and everything in it is built so that they never need one.
02 — Context
The brief
The church has two different readers. The first comes from search and wants to know who these people are, what they believe and when they can visit. The second is already inside and needs announcements, the schedule and materials that are not shown to the outside.
The site will be updated by people without technical skills: a notice that a meeting is moved, the verse of the week, a new conference. Each of these must take a minute and must not break the page. And all of this on a video background that must not cost speed.
03 — Solution
How it works
3.1
An admin panel built for people, not for WordPress
A custom panel with plain words instead of the standard admin: announcement, verse of the week, conference, link. Fields are labelled in human language, unnecessary menus are gone. A member logs in, writes two sentences, presses “Publish”, and the announcement is on the home page and in the app.
3.2
Access rights by role
Who can do what is decided in advance: some publish announcements, others maintain meeting materials, others only see the private section. Nobody lands in theme or plugin settings by accident, so nobody breaks anything.
3.3
Hidden sections for members
Part of the site is visible only after login: sermon recordings, internal announcements, materials for members. From the outside these pages are not in the menu, not in search and not in the sitemap.
3.4
A speed score of 97–100 with video on the first screen
The video background does not load until it is needed: a poster is shown first, the clip is pulled in after the page has loaded, and phones get a lighter version. Fonts live on the site’s own server, styles are inlined into the page, not a single external request before consent. Hence 97–100 in PageSpeed on mobile and desktop.
3.5
A member app with notifications
The mobile app shows what matters most: upcoming meetings, announcements, the verse of the day refreshed every 15 minutes. When a meeting is moved, members get a notification on their phone instead of finding a locked door. The app takes its data from the same site, nothing is entered twice.
3.6
Compliance with German requirements
Cookie consent, analytics that keep data on the server, maps and video only after consent. Texts written with AI are honestly marked “KI-generiert”. For a church in Germany this is not a formality but protection from lawyers’ letters.
04 — Outcome
Result
The church runs the site itself: announcements, verses, conferences, private materials. A developer is needed only for new features.
Members learn about changes and events from the app, not from hearsay. A visitor from search sees a fast, calm site with video that opens instantly even on an old phone.