A small Hamilton church website, initially built in GatsbyJS, rebuilt in SvelteKit, quietly streaming sermons through it all.
Inspiring
Hope Church.
A field report by ORB IT Solutions · Hamilton, OH
| Client | Inspiring Hope Church |
|---|---|
| Scope | Website · CMS · Live streams · SEO |
| Location | Hamilton, Ohio |
| Timeline | Aug 2020 - Oct 2023 |
| Stack | GatsbyJS · SvelteKit · NodeJS |
| Video | HLS · Linode Object Storage |
| Status | Engagement Completed |
Inspiring Hope Church came to ORB IT Solutions looking to expand their digital presence beyond just Facebook page and a phone number. They needed a online location of their very own.
The breif was: "Build us something where people can find us, listen to past Sunday messages, sign up for events and allows members to give online easily."
We built it on Gatsby — fast, static, content-friendly; the right call for 2020. Three years and major version upgrades later, the church's needs had outgrown the stack: Live sermon streaming, a growing video archive, events with detail pages, even a donation flow. As time went on, the Gatsby project build and deploy cycle became much slower.
So we rebuilt it with SvelteKit. Half the surface area, modern Web Components for the video player, but with the same Bulma-based brand intact. Nothing the congregation saw broke. The migration shipped quietly, the site kept running, Sunday kept coming.
The Pivot
Gatsby → SvelteKit
The new version is on its first major. The old version reached its third before we retired it. The brand language carried across unchanged — Bulma stayed, the palette stayed, the layout DNA stayed. What changed was everything underneath.
Gatsby
v32020 — 2023
SvelteKit
v12023 onwards
Reliably delivered, every Sunday.
Non-profits don't typically have relaunch budgets. By building a maintainable system from the start, this migration was seamless and cost-effective.
◉ ORB IT Solutions · § The Pivot
Architecture · Systems Design
Self running infrastructure. AI where it adds value.
Static-first, both stacks
Gatsby and SvelteKit both shipped pre-rendered HTML. No server-side rendering, no cold starts, no Sunday-morning timeouts.
Ghost CMS at build time
Ghost ran on a private Linode VPS. A content publish triggered a Drone CI build automatically. Anyone with a Ghost account could update the site, no developer required. The pipeline handled the rest.
HLS streaming, cutting-edge AI post-processing
Sermons were stored in Object Storage and served as HLS streams. Livestream video post-processing used AI to generate captions in English and Spanish, extending the reach of every sermon to the wider Hamilton community, without extra effort from the church.
Analytics reports
A weekly digest of visitor activity landed in the team's inbox automatically, so the church could see what was resonating without opening a dashboard.
Same standards. New tools.
| LAYER | V1 · GATSBY | V2 · SVELTEKIT |
|---|---|---|
| Unit tests | Jest | Vitest |
| E2E tests | Cypress | None |
| Component tests | None | Storybook 7 |
| Linting | ESLint | Biome + ESLint |
| Type safety | None (JS) | TypeScript |
| Build | Drone CI | Drone CI |
| Deploy | Cloud VPS | Object Storage + Cloud VPS |
◉ End of field report ◊ ◊ ◊
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Technology · Platforms