Estaca Caracas
“Fe · Familia · Servicio.”
A website for a stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Caracas. It began as the page for a stake conference and became a permanent portal for anyone who wants to learn about the Church, with an AI assistant that answers questions in a warm, personal voice.
- Dates
- Apr 23 – Oct 18, 2026
- Role
- Volunteer · design and development
- Stack
- HTML · CSS · JS · Vercel Functions · Groq
- 147commits
- 133unit tests
- 2stake conferences
How it was built, day by day
Written from the project's commit history. Decisions are marked in red.
- Launch
A site for the stake conference, in a day
Schedule, invitation, contact form and complete SEO and social metadata, live the same day.
- Design
A full UX pass
The hero became two columns with the scripture beside the image, and content, mobile, desktop and performance were reviewed end to end.
The hero, with the scripture beside the image - Build
Its own domain and faster pages
Moved to estacacaracas.com, preloaded the main image, compressed photos, fixed contrast and layout shift, and added structured data for the organisation.
- Design
A contact form that adapts
Email comes first by default. The phone number only becomes required when someone chooses WhatsApp or a call, with a friendly fallback if sending fails.
- Build
An AI missionary assistant
A chatbot on Groq (Llama 3.1 8B) grounded in official Church content, written in a warm, member-like voice. It offers a free Book of Mormon and says it is an AI when asked.
The assistant, with suggested questions - Build
Local SEO for Caracas
Structured data for a religious organisation and its place, geographic metadata and local FAQs.
- Build
WhatsApp, one tap away
A floating WhatsApp button, with every tap counted as a lead.
- Build
Speed and security
A Content-Security-Policy, PWA icons, no layout shift on the hero, and interactive scripts deferred until the page is idle.
- Decision
From event page to information portal
After the conference, the site became a permanent portal about the stake and the Church instead of being taken down.
- Launch
The portal announces the next conference
The same site now invites people to the November 2026 stake conference, under a living-water theme.
- Design
Living water
New photos, a palette taken from the conference flyer (steel blue and soft teal) and small water animations: drops with ripples on headings, rising bubbles in the programme, waves above the contact form.
- Build
The assistant had gone quiet
Groq retired the model behind the assistant, so it had been answering only from its local fallback. It moved to a live model, failures now show up in the logs, and it is told today’s date in Caracas so it never speaks of the conference as past.
- Build
133 tests on the real page
Unit tests run against the real HTML and scripts: form, assistant, schedule, structured data and sitemap, on every pull request. On their first run they caught the thank-you message inserting the visitor’s name as HTML; it is now escaped.
- Build
Search engines told about every deploy
A complete Event schema with a free offer, a WebSite schema, a sitemap that refreshes on each build, and an IndexNow ping after every production deployment.
