Overview

St Thomas Becket has stood above Chapel-en-le-Frith since 1225. The town literally takes its name from it: the chapel in the forest. Yet online the parish had almost no presence, so service times, weddings and community events lived on notice boards and word of mouth. Built pro bono as a contribution to the town, the brief was a digital home worthy of an 800-year-old building: cinematic enough to move a first-time visitor, warm enough to feel like a parish, and simple enough for volunteers to keep current without touching code.

st-thomas-becket.church

Visit the live site

Design System: "Stone, Sage & Copper"

The palette is lifted from the building itself: warm gritstone, churchyard green and the copper of candlelight on old brass. Set in a classic serif over a generous 18px body size, the site reads like a well-made order of service rather than a template, editorial and unhurried, with room to breathe.

Colour Palette

Cream

#FFFDF8 · Warm page background

Stone

#F5F0EB · Section surfaces

Charcoal

#2C2C2C · Ink & headings

Sage

#7A8B6F · Churchyard green accent

Copper

#A86544 · Warm accent & CTAs

Typography

Playfair Display (Serif): High-contrast editorial headings that carry the weight of eight centuries without feeling stuffy.
Source Sans 3 (Body): A humanist sans at a deliberately large body size, so older parishioners never squint.

The Scroll Is the Film

The homepage opens like a piece of cinema: letterbox bars part to reveal footage of the nave, then the scroll itself becomes the playhead. We shot the church and exported the footage as a 300-frame image sequence drawn to a canvas, because scrubbing a video element by currentTime stutters under fast scrolling while drawing a pre-decoded still is instant. Scroll down and the camera moves through the building; scroll up and it rewinds.

Performance Without Compromise

The frame sequence loads in deferred batches after first paint, so roughly 20MB of footage never competes with the poster image for the first render. Until frames arrive, a lightweight poster shows through, and the whole effect steps aside for visitors who prefer reduced motion.

An Opening That Knows When to Stop

The iris intro plays once per session, so moving between pages never replays it. A short establishing shot runs on a timer before the scroll takes over, with an exponential glide easing the handover so fast flicks stay smooth.

A Site the Parish Runs Itself

A church site fails the day its service times go stale. Everything that changes week to week is pulled from tools the parish already uses, so nobody ever needs to edit code to keep the site true.

Live What's On

Services and events flow straight from the parish Google Calendar, so the website updates the moment the diary does.

Life Events

Dedicated journeys for baptisms, weddings and funerals, walking families through the practical steps at a difficult or joyful moment.

Online Giving

A GiveALittle donation page sits alongside the traditional envelope scheme and collection plate, meeting every generation where they are.

Google Reviews

Visitors' own words about the building surfaced on-site, social proof for a place that has earned it over 800 years.

Eight Hundred Years, One Timeline

The church was dedicated in 1225 to Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered in his own cathedral, and celebrated its 800th anniversary in 2025. That story deserved more than a paragraph, so we built it as an interactive timeline: eight centuries of worship, rebuilding and community life told chapter by chapter, from the foresters' first chapel to the anniversary year. It turns the history page from an obligation into the reason people share the site.

"A building that has served its town for eight hundred years deserves better than a template. We built this one as a gift to the community: a site that feels the way the church does, quiet, beautiful and open to everyone, and one the parish can keep alive without ever calling a developer."

StThomasBecketChurch

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Year

Tech Stack