Website
A church website in half an hour of my time, with 10 designs to choose from
My church, a young Ukrainian church in Hoogeveen, had no website, only Instagram, Linktree and a Telegram chat. I offered to build one and, in half an hour of my own time directing Claude Code, put a live site on its own domain with Astro and Cloudflare Pages. Instead of one design to approve, I built 10 design directions on the real content and narrowed them to a shortlist of 4 for the church to choose from, plus an events section where a new event is one Markdown file.
0.5 h of my time, from empty folder to a live site on its own domain
10 → 4 design directions, shortlisted for the church to choose
1 file per event, past events move to the archive by themselves
0 hosting fees static site on Cloudflare Pages, only the domain is paid
The task
My church is a young Ukrainian church in Hoogeveen, in the Netherlands. Its information lived in Instagram, a Linktree page, a Telegram chat and Google Forms, but there was no website. A newcomer could not quickly find when and where the services are, what the church is about, what is coming up and how to join.
I offered to build the site. The church had not chosen a visual style yet, so the site also had to help it make that choice.
Ten directions instead of one design
Instead of one design to approve or reject, I built 10 design directions with the same content: Motion Blur, Acid Night, Swiss Grid, Neo-Brutal, Y2K Chrome, 70s Groovy, Quiet Luxury, Terminal, Comic Pop and Slavonic Sky. Each is a self-contained page with its own fonts and styles, and every font supports Cyrillic, because the site is in Ukrainian.
Three directions did not land with the church, so I replaced them with new ones (Bento, Matchday, Riso Zine) and narrowed the set to a shortlist of 4: Motion Blur, Acid Night, Quiet Luxury and Bento. Each has a light and a dark mode, and a thin bar at the bottom switches between them, so the church compares real working pages. The final choice is the church’s.
One source of content
All copy, the schedule and the links live in one data file that every design reads. Changing the style never means rewriting content. The links are the church’s real ones from its Linktree and Instagram: the get-to-know form, prayer requests, mentoring, Telegram and a Tikkie donation. Anything not confirmed yet, like the email, is kept as a marked placeholder, not invented.
Events
- Each event is one Markdown file with its poster.
- The events page shows upcoming events, a category filter that appears once there are two categories, and an archive by year.
- Every event has its own page: poster, date, time, place, an I’m coming button, Add to calendar, the full announcement and
Eventstructured data, with the poster as the link preview. - Past events are never deleted. They move to the archive at build time, and in the browser if an event ends after the last deploy.
Built to be found
The technical base for search went in from the start: canonical URLs, Open Graph with a link-preview image, a sitemap without the alternative styles, robots.txt pointing to it, and noindex on the styles that are not the main one. I also wrote an SEO and GEO checklist for the site, so it can be found in Google and named by AI assistants when someone asks about a Ukrainian church in Hoogeveen.
Result
For half an hour of my time the church got a live website at oxychurchhoogeveen.com with the real schedule, address, links and the first event. It is static, hosted on Cloudflare Pages with automatic deploy from GitHub, so there are no hosting fees and nothing to update on a server. I built it with Claude Code under my direction.
What’s next
When the church picks the final style, it moves to the home page and the other styles go. Then the work continues from the checklist: a real 404 page, Church structured data with the service schedule, llms.txt, Search Console, Bing and a Google Business Profile.
Tools
FAQ
How long did it take, and what did the church get?
Half an hour of my own time, directing Claude Code, from an empty project to a live site on its own domain. Service times, address, values, the get-to-know form, prayer requests and the first event are now on one site instead of spread over Instagram, Linktree, Telegram and Google Forms. The church liked the speed.
Why show the church 10 designs instead of one?
The church had not chosen a style, and approving one mock-up at a time can turn into a long back-and-forth. I built 10 directions on the same real content, so people compared working pages, which the church liked. Three did not land with them, so I replaced those three with new directions and narrowed the set to a shortlist of 4. Because all copy lives in one data file, swapping a style never meant rewriting content.
Why Astro and not WordPress or a site builder?
The church's main worry was that the site would be hard to keep up to date. A static Astro site has no CMS, plugins or server to update, and a push to GitHub deploys it. All copy lives in one data file shared by every design, and events are plain files, so updates stay small.
How does the church add a new event?
Each event is one Markdown file with its poster, with no code changes. It gets its own page with date, time, place, I'm coming and Add to calendar buttons and Event structured data, and after it ends it moves to the archive automatically. The event pages were one of the things the church liked about the site.
What does the website cost to run?
Only the domain. The site is static and hosted on Cloudflare Pages, so there are no hosting fees, no server and no plugins to update.
Why a website if the church already has Instagram and Linktree?
Feeds and link pages do not answer a newcomer's first questions: when, where and how to join. The site answers them on one page and is built to be found: canonical URLs, a sitemap, Event structured data and an SEO and GEO checklist, so it can show up in Google and be named by AI assistants when someone asks about a Ukrainian church in Hoogeveen.
How does the church choose the final design?
It compares the 4 shortlisted styles as working pages with the real content, each in light and dark mode, switching between them with a bar at the bottom. The chosen style becomes the home page, the others are removed, and the search work continues from a written checklist.
Need a simple website for a church or a small organisation that is easy to keep up to date? Get in touch and we'll talk it through.