180 Life Church: Digital Renovation
A ground-up site for 180 Life Church in Bloomfield, Connecticut: sermons synced from YouTube, giving, leadership pages, and a CMS the staff edit themselves. Built; now in hardening and hand-off.
Why Every skill is a gift. When a local church needs a digital home that actually reflects who they are, that is a chance to serve with purpose. This project is me using the craft God gave me to help a growing community reach more people.
The Church
180 Life Church is a warm, non-denominational community in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Their doors are open to everyone. The heart behind 180 Life is simple: know God, find real connection, and take the next step together. They are building something life-giving, and their website should feel like that.
The Work
A ground-up rebuild. Modern, accessible, mobile-first, fast, and a visual identity that communicates welcome before a single word is read. Just as important: the people who run the church need to run the site without me on the phone.
Where We Are
Discovery is done and the site is built. Since the spring it has picked up:
- Sermons synced from the church’s YouTube channel, with retries so a quota hiccup doesn’t break a build, plus an audio player for listening on the go.
- Giving, leadership, and support-team pages the staff update themselves through the CMS.
- A contact flow with verification and spam protection.
- A security pass before launch: response headers, XSS hardening in the CMS, and personal emails pulled out of the public site.
- Hosting cost tuning so pages revalidate on a sensible schedule instead of rebuilding constantly.
What’s left is hand-off. Documentation, a walkthrough with the team, and the boring-but-important work of making sure nothing depends on me.
Stack
- Core: Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel
- Content: A CMS the staff edit directly; sermons pulled from the YouTube Data API
- Hosting: Edge-deployed with incremental revalidation