### The Client

Bay Vista Baptist Church has served the spiritual needs of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast for decades. They emphasize serving their community as well; they were a hub for FEMA during Hurricane Katrina relief and recovery efforts, and they are a relay point for each year’s Operation Christmas Child campaign.

### The Problem

In late 2013, the authors of their current website were no longer around, and no one could get to the site to update it.

### The Solution

We developed and continue to maintain a fast, static website that can be updated by multiple trained church members. The site also has a repository for their sermons dating back to January 2014, and a podcast feed that gives their ministry a global reach.

Initially, we set up a WordPress-based site, where multiple people could have the ability to maintain the site. We manually downloaded all the publically-accessible parts of their old site, and used that content to form the basis for the new side, updating outdated information along the way. We maintained the same look-and-feel, but soon moved to a more mobile-friendly layout.

In 2016, we determined that we were the only ones updating the site, so we transformed the site to use a static site generator; this resulted in fast page loads, with automation providing scheduled updates. We also wrote a custom template for the podcast feed, which is also generated as a static file.

In 2019, we open sourced the site's source code. We also set up Azure Pipelines to automatically build and deploy the site both on demand and on a schedule. Finally, we trained other church members on updating the site's contents and the podcast feed.