Love's Gate
My grandmother spent her life helping people. This is the one place where all of that work lives.
My grandmother spent her life helping people. This is the one place where all of that work lives.
My grandmother, Eveline Nachtegaele, has spent her entire life helping people: her family, her community, and strangers on the other side of the world. Her ministry has taken her across the globe to do charity work for orphanages, churches, and villages, and she has never needed a reason beyond someone being in need.
She is a massive figure to me and to just about everyone around her. She is a pillar of her community, the person you can always come to, and someone who is not afraid of hard work when helping is hardest to do.
She started Loves Gate Ministry out of Angleton, Texas, and for a quarter century she has carried her original music into county jails, prison yards, and parish halls, and far beyond Texas to Canada, Bosnia, Panama, Vietnam, and states across the US. Along the way she wrote and recorded two full-length albums with her co-founder Kevin Cadenhead, Beyond This Road and From Now On.
Her charity work stretches well past the edge of her town. She has self-funded and crowd-sourced hundreds of thousands of dollars for poor countries, building roads and churches and feeding people when nobody else bothered to help. She is a major part of why I care about charity work and volunteering at all.
For years she talked about having a website: one address she could hand to people so they could hear her music, learn about the ministry, and support the causes she is part of. The work she is most proud of was essentially nonexistent on the internet. She had CDs made and handed them out at the churches she visited, and a handful of songs sat on YouTube, but almost everything else was physical only.
If you wanted to find her work, you had to already know her. The brief I gave myself was simple and personal: build the one home where all of it lives, and make it the central place to learn about her life's work.
My grandma and I decided early that nobody should have to pay for this music. Both albums stream straight from the page in a player I built into the site, and every track can be downloaded on its own or as a whole album, whichever the listener wants. No storefront, no checkout, no account. Pressing play is the easiest thing on the site.
There was no single place you could send a person and say: this is her work, listen. Now there is.
Click into any song's details and the lyrics are there, tracked to the recording as it plays. The line she is singing lights up as it goes by, and clicking any line jumps the song straight to that moment. These songs were written to be understood, so the site treats the words with the same care as the audio.
Some songs deserved more than audio. There is an entire section dedicated to the music videos I helped her create, pulled from the ministry's YouTube channel and watchable right on the page, with new ones joining as her songs keep getting released.
The most important part of this entire project was letting Eveline do the heavy lifting. The site's account of how far she has gone to worship and praise the Lord, and how many thousands of people she has helped through His hand, is hers. Over multiple Zoom calls and afternoons in person, we built an accurate accounting of what the ministry and its charity work have actually accomplished.
She had thousands of pictures, letters written to her, and charity records from the last thirty years spread across multiple hard drives. With Claude and Codex, I had all of it scraped, categorized, and placed onto the website through the skills and workflows I have been building for months, the same workflow system I share publicly on GitHub. The result is an interactive timeline of her charity efforts, from her earliest music to the work she is doing right now.
Live at lovesgateministry.org: the music, the videos, the charity efforts, the team, and a way to reach her, all in one place her family can point anyone to.
Most of my projects are for clients or for me. This one was for my grandmother, and it changed how I judged the work. A slow page or a broken form on a lead-gen site costs a sale. Here it would have meant her life's work sitting behind a bad first impression, so the bar was quietly higher the whole way through.
She spent her whole life showing up for people. Building this was the smallest way to show up for her.