A community centre is many things at once: a place of worship, a school, a meeting room, a fundraising base. The website's job is to hold all of that together without making any one part feel like an afterthought.
Replacing the old WordPress
BMICC's existing site was a years-old WordPress build that had aged on every front — design, content management, performance. Even small edits required walking around quirks the team had inherited rather than chosen. We retired it cleanly and designed and developed a replacement from the ground up.
Live prayer times
The homepage carries live prayer times calculated for Calgary, updating through the day. It's the single most-checked piece of information on the site, and it's the reason members open it more than once a day. Once they're there, the rest of the centre's life is one click away.
Services and events the team can run themselves
Prayers, classes, family services, social events and special programmes sit on a CMS designed for the team's rhythm. Forms are short, structure is predictable, publishing is instant — so a new event goes live the day it's decided, not the next sprint.
Donations that fit the supporter
Giving is integrated into the same surface, with Stripe and PayPal running side by side so donors at home in Calgary and supporters overseas use the same form. Goal-based campaigns sit alongside the standard donation form — each campaign has a target, a running total visible to the next donor, and the same payment path so a campaign gift takes the same few clicks as any other.
Where it sits today
BMICC's members have one place to be in touch with the centre. The team's hours go to programmes and pastoral work, not to copy-paste between platforms.