Central Ohio Lutheran Immigrant Mission
Branding & Web Development To Support A Christian Community in Ohio
Pastor Ben Meyer of the LC-MS reached out to me to ask about building a simple website for the Central Ohio Lutheran Immigrant Mission, an organization that helps to care for the large amount of Somali immigrants in the central Ohio area. I immediately jumped at the chance to be a part of this organization.
The mission required a logo, which was the first order of business. I put together a simple logo featuring the organizational name, a Dove and Cross, and a Crown of Thorns. The logo took very little tweaking, as the first draft was pretty much exactly what the mission was looking for. This had the added benefit of settling brand colors.
From there I built a very basic website on Hugo with TailWindCSS for speed. While I don’t normally use TailWind in production, for smaller sites it is pretty idea.
The website needed some basic features, including a Newsletter sign up, image galleries, donation integration, and newsletters.
The Newsletter sign up is a custom form that integrates via the MailChimp API to the COLIM newsletter service. The donation integration is a simple PayPal button, as that was the quickest and easiest way for them to get donations online. The Image Galleries are a TailWind component that I modified to run off of Hugo’s range function, based on a local folder in the repo.
The Newsletter feature just takes advantage of Hugo’s native blogging capability.
There were some added challenges and privacy concerns. The mission itself is actually very dangerous, despite being in Ohio. People who defect from the local African Muslim community are often threatened, or actually physically harmed, children are kidnapped, and people are harassed. For that reason a large amount of the data on the website is intentionally obfuscated. The website itself is static and thus naturally hardened against attack, but we still want to protect what analytical data is gathered. The newsletter service, thus, is encrypted, and a special JavaScript call is made to the YouTube API to integrate and embed videos without loading in all the Google Trackers.
All in all, it was a very fun project and I enjoy continuing to work on it as needed!