St. Demetrios

Why it looks this way.

Typography

Cinzel is built from Roman inscriptional capitals, the chiselled letter you see in the band of text around a Byzantine dome. It gives the headings a carved, liturgical stillness. Literata carries the reading because it has a complete Greek alphabet; anything set in Greek switches to Noto Serif automatically so accents and breathings are always correct.

• Cinzel headlines
• Literata body text

Color

Oxblood and old gold come from the vestments and the gilded iconostasis, set on a pale marble ground rather than a cream. The dark theme is the church at Vespers: near-black, with the gold becoming the main color the way candlelight picks out the icons. A faint grain sits under everything, like the gesso of an icon board.

• Page #EFEDE8
• Cards #FAF8F4
• Text #211B1C
• Brand #7A1E2C
• Accent #8C6520

Layout

The split screen works like a printed service book: the parish name, the Sunday times and the six pages stay fixed on the left while the content scrolls on the right. The language switch sits in that panel, so a grandmother can turn the whole site to Greek in one tap and keep it there.

Pages: Home, Services, Sacraments, Feast & festival, Greek School, Parish life

Hero

The home page opens on a single photograph of candles burning in the sand tray before the icons, with no words over it. The headline sits underneath like a museum caption, because lighting a candle is the first thing every Orthodox Christian does on entering, and it is the first thing a visitor should understand about the building.

Calls to action

The one button that is always visible is Arrange a sacrament. Baptisms, weddings and memorials are the reasons most people contact a Greek parish, and each needs weeks of notice and paperwork. The other actions are just as specific: Enroll in Greek School, Come to the feast, Make your stewardship pledge.

Photography

Candles, icons, a priest at a font with a family, children reading at a school desk, a long table at the feast. We left out onion domes and Russian exteriors; the photographs had to look like a Greek parish in Queens rather than a postcard.

Accessibility

Every heading, button and service name exists in both languages, with the correct lang attribute so screen readers pronounce Greek as Greek. Long paragraphs stay in English with Greek headings, so nothing is machine-translated. Body text is 18px and the oxblood on marble passes AA comfortably.