Prayers from the Heart

Perhaps my most ambitious freelance project to date, Prayers from the Heart is a deeply meaningful website created to sort and display over eight hundred prayers written by my client. I met him through one of my counselors at Lone Star College, and though I admit I was a bit intimidated by the idea of creating a website with so much content, I gladly took on the challenge. After speaking with my client, I realized I needed to make a site that was simple in design, efficient in its purpose, user-friendly for people of all ages and with different levels of tech know-how, and welcoming to the average audience of prayer-seekers.

WordPress was the ideal platform for his prayers - their categorizing and tagging systems are easy enough to use for sorting posts, and all it took was making a simple template that could be re-used for each prayer with only a slight modification of the category to put it under the relevant topic. The process of making the site itself took many weeks of preparation, including working with the client to decide on appropriate categories to list on the home page and organizing the prayers themselves. I was mailed a stack of papers that had the titles of all eight hundred-plus prayers with their corresponding category neatly written beside them, so I tasked myself with digitally sorting the files into folders to make the uploading process easier on myself.

​Though the process was still extremely time-consuming, I was able to get all of the current prayers uploaded, formatted, and tagged so that anyone who has a particular subject of prayer in mind can easily find what they're looking for. I chose the GeneratePress theme for its speed and its compatibility with Elementor, which is my favorite WordPress site building tool. As arduous as the task of uploading was, the rest of the site was quite the learning experience in terms of testing out CSS tweaks, learning how to use new WP plugins, and making minor theme edits to make the site as user-friendly as possible.

My client, Mr. Gaithe, is "keeping me" on the project indefinitely as he continues to write more prayers, so I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the site reaches a post count of over one thousand.