GraceGuides

Inspiration

We were inspired by our Christian faith and a desire to create something that could help others as they walk through the many struggles of life. We knew that we could pair our (beginner) knowledge of web development with our knowledge of the Bible to help others!

What it does

GraceGuides is a Christian resources website designed to provide biblical advice and encouragement to people who are struggling with anxiety, depression, identity and much more. There are video sermons, Bible verses, and linked articles — all sorted by topic. We even included a journaling tool! All done in a visually clean, fluid, and easy to use website!

How we built it

GraceGuides was built with html, css, and javascript, using Replit as our IDE.

Challenges we ran into

Half our group was completely new to web development and design! The first few hours were a big challenge and a sharp learning curve. After we got comfortable with html and Replit, the ideas started flowing. Our biggest challenge was css styling. Keeping everything organized while trying not to break the whole webpage was time consuming and tedious, but much was learned! Another bump in the road was our notepad section. We originally wanted our journaling section to be a community discussion board, but after getting our chatroom to 90% completion, we were unable to get it working so that multiple users could message each other (It worked great if you just wanted to talk to yourself though). We decided to convert it to an equally useful notepad for journaling! Hours were spent troubleshooting the collapsible buttons in the “Scripture” section (the text under the headings needed to be set to “display = none”).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We think our greatest accomplishment was starting with a team of people with little to no experience in web development and ending with a fully functional website! Our home page and menu looks great as well! We wanted to make parts like the home page, navigation menus, and footer match up with common website features you see in the wild. The collapsible buttons in the “scriptures” section look especially clean and significantly helped to organize that part of the website. Lastly, a lot of work went into our journaling notepad. After completely transforming it from a failed chatroom to a properly operating notepad, the next goal was to make it as user friendly as possible. I would say we did a solid job given our experience level.

What we learned

We learned so much about basic web development / design, from getting the structure down with html, to styling with css, and even experimenting with some javascript. We discovered how much work goes into designing a website! Stylizing everything, trying to get headers and buttons and text just right was definitely a valuable teaching experience. We also learned what 2 hours of sleep on a classroom floor does to a person! (yay)

What's next for GraceGuides

The biggest next step for GraceGuides is to take it online! We have a domain name, but by uploading and setting up our website, we can begin helping people with the resources our website provides. Alongside this, we can continue building on our site with other ideas we didn't have time to implement. We can add a section for counseling, get our discussion chatroom working, and further modernize the styling/format.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• replit