Cornerstone
Episcopal, Anglican and Lutheran parishes that keep the calendar
Commons
Churches whose building is open and busy on weekdays
What it is
For a church whose building is the point. Somebody arriving at this site is as likely to want the food bank's opening hours as a service time, and the structure treats those two readers as equally important — because on a Tuesday afternoon, one of them is the only one there.
For a congregation whose public face is the food bank, the toddler group and the warm room as much as Sunday. Opening hours are a timetable, getting help and volunteering are separate pages written for two different readers, and the whole thing is set in a plain civic register that does not make a hard week look like a marketing campaign.
What is in it
- An opening-hours timetable for the building, not just a service list
- “Get help” and “Volunteer” as separate pages, because they are written for two people in very different situations
- “What the shelves are short of” — a page that changes weekly and is meant to
- “What we will and will not ask you”, which is the sentence that decides whether somebody walks in
- “Who to call instead” for the things the church does not do, with real referrals
All 8 pages
Every one is written — there is no placeholder text in any of them. Click any page to open it in the live demo.
What to change first
The opening-hours timetable, and then “What the shelves are short of”. Those two pages are the ones people will return to; everything else can wait.
Questions about Commons
The demo is bilingual. Is that built in?
The demo shows an English/Spanish congregation because that is common for this kind of church, and the markup carries `lang` attributes where the language changes. It is not a translation system — for a fully bilingual site you would duplicate the pages, which with plain HTML is a copy and an edit.
Why does it look so plain?
Deliberately. This template is set in a civic register — closer to a library or a council notice than to a brochure — because a food bank presented as a marketing campaign reads badly to the people who need it.
