Holy Martyrs of Vietnam Website

Background

Holy Martyrs of Vietnam Parish, established in 1997, is the first Vietnamese Catholic parish in the U.S. since 1975. With a rich heritage, it has been a community cornerstone. The old Joomla and PHP website was in Vietnamese and had an outdated design, making it inaccessible to non-technical users and non-Vietnamese speakers. As a parishioner, I aim to modernize the website to better serve both Vietnamese Americans and non-Vietnamese speakers.

Old Website

Website Requirements

• A user-friendly Content Management System (CMS)
• An announcements system for parish updates
• Responsive and accessible design for multilingual support
• Modern and visually appealing user interface

Development

I chose WordPress for its ease of use and popularity as a modern CMS. As this was my first public website, I prioritized tools that were easy to build upon. I integrated their CMS to managing files, forms, posts, and announcements, integrated Google Maps and Calendar for accessibility, added a language switcher for multilingual support, and ensured the design met modern usability standards.

Notes

This project was more challenging than expected, requiring careful planning for device compatibility and accessibility. I learned to create an SSL certificate, the process to deploy and host the site, and collaborate with priests and users. It was a valuable learning experience, especially with WordPress. In the future, I’d consider using a framework like Astro with a headless CMS like Directus for more control over the code and to leverage libraries not available in WordPress, better aligning with my expertise.