St George’s Parish Church, Belfast

Client Profile

St George’s Parish Church, Belfast (Demo Preview)

Project Summary

St George’s is a High Church (Anglo-Catholic) parish of the Church of Ireland in Belfast city centre, worshipping on the site where the city itself began since 1816. Its music, led by Director of Music David Falconer, carries one of the last men-and-boys choirs in Ireland alongside a Female Voice Choir, a Chamber Choir, and an historic organ. This bespoke demo lifts the parish out of a template site graded D and gives its worship, music, history, and outreach a dignified, current home, every section editable in the Fugue Lab CMS.

Objectives

• Carry the dignity of a 200-year-old Georgian church, not a generic church template
• Put the renowned choral tradition and the historic organ front and centre
• Fix the crawlability gaps the old site had: no sitemap, no structured data, blocked zoom
• Hand the parish a site the office can keep current itself

What We Implemented

• Custom “open door in the heart of the city” theme: cool Portland-stone surface, stained-glass sapphire, and antique gilt, with candlelit feature bands
• Signature Cinzel inscriptional Roman capitals over a gilt hairline, carved-stone lettering echoing the 1788 Corinthian portico
• A split candlelit hero pairing a solid text panel with the parish choir by candlelight
• Content drawn verbatim from the parish’s own pages (three choirs, the organ appeal, the 1816 history, outreach, clergy and music staff)
• Vite + React 18 + Tailwind CSS 4 wired to @gjl/site-kit as a bespoke-but-CMS-editable site
• SSR/hydration with per-route static prerendering (SSG), generated sitemap, robots, and JSON-LD
• Thirteen routes: Home, Worship, Music, The Organ, History, Events, Community, People, Support, Join, Contact, plus Privacy and Accessibility

Results

• Thirteen fully prerendered routes scoring 99/100 (A) on the rendered quality audit, with accessibility and SEO at 100
• A reverent, historic identity that finally does justice to the choral tradition
• Structured data, social-share tags, and a sitemap the graded-D site lacked
• A CMS-editable platform the parish office can update without touching design or code