Gulf States Conference Website Rebuild

A complete website rebuild for the Gulf States Conference, migrated from a CMS that had become difficult to maintain without technical expertise. The existing setup made routine content updates inaccessible to non-technical staff, creating bottlenecks across departments. Squarespace was selected at the client's request for its familiar interface and built-in hosting — prioritizing long-term content independence for the team managing it.

Handled as a sole-developer engagement covering every phase of the project — from initial requirements gathering and platform evaluation to information architecture, UI/UX decisions, and full-stack development. Beyond the technical build, the role included managing client expectations, defining scope, coordinating content migration across 20+ pages, and ensuring that department secretaries, ministry leaders, and administrators were properly onboarded to manage their own sections of the site independently.

With Squarespace selected as the platform, the challenge became building well beyond its native capabilities. The solution was a hybrid architecture: Squarespace's drag-and-drop interface was used as the content layer for editors, while all custom behavior was delivered through code injection and purpose-built JavaScript widgets embedded directly into the pages. Custom events calendar and blog article were built from scratch using vanilla JavaScript, consuming Squarespace's native JSON API to fetch and render event data dynamically with client-side filtering by category and date, giving staff full control over how events are surfaced without any third-party plugins. Three distinct headers were developed and scoped to specific sections of the site a standard header for general pages, a dedicated Education header, and a Youth header each reflecting the identity of its respective department while maintaining overall brand consistency.A reusable design system was established through CSS code injection, using clamp-based responsive layouts and a consistent component library — ensuring visual coherence across 20+ pages while keeping the codebase maintainable for future additions. Every component was built with the client's non-technical editors in mind: the drag-and-drop layer stays clean and predictable, while all the complexity lives underneath.