Examples of this are as follows:
Small Groups Manager
Calendar
Service Opportunities
Member Login

This is just one example with one tool set. Throughout the years, faithHighway has successful integrated many different church software programs into its sites. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: Fellowship One, Church Community Builder, Connection Power, and The City.

The point of all this is simple; don’t let the tools that you’re currently using prevent you from achieve the look and feel that you want.  Your website should indeed be a useful resource for you and your congregation, and an existing tool set can certainly assist with that. However, if the look and feel of your website isn’t representative of who you are, then the effectiveness of your website will be forever limited in what it can do for you.

There is perhaps no more difficult situation for a client than when they are forced to change their point of contact midway through a project. However, there are times when it is simply necessary to do so. This was the case with Alamo City Church of San Antonio, Texas.

In the 5 years I’ve been with faithHighway, I have never encountered a situation where a client handled this better than Mr. Carl Tindle. Carl is the director of IT Services with Alamo City, and took over as the main contact on the project roughly midway through the process.

To put it in perspective, Alamo City is a very large project, with an extensive main site, 4 full subsites, and a good deal of custom work on several different ministry sites. Not only did Carl provide us with all the information and feedback we needed to complete the work, he also did an excellent job of working with the editor, Sermon Flow, and the flash tools to make sure that the site was populated and ready to launch for the church’s desired launch date. In short, Carl was presented with a set of seemingly impossible circumstances, and came through with flying colors.

The result of the combined efforts of Carl and faithHighway are proudly displayed at http://www.alamocity.org. The features of this site are so numerous that I won’t try to break them down here. Instead, I’ll just recommend that you visit http://www.alamocity.org/ and check them out for yourself.

I offer my congratulations to Alamo City for furthering their online ministry efforts with this powerful new tool, and my sincere thanks to Carl and all his efforts. I can speak with absolute certainty when I say that this site would still be in production without his tireless devotion to the site. Thank you Carl, for making my job here that much easier, and I look forward to the opportunity to work with you again in the future.

Ah distinctly I recall when Vicky said “I want them all!”
All the blog posts for the month in days of yore
Verily did I grab my pen, to spin a yarn of Go Lives when,
Inspiration struck me like it never had before.
“Morello Hills,” I whispered, “A brand new site from which the Word of God shall pour”
For whom there is no, 404.

Yes Morello Hills my friends; like Maxwell House, “good til the end”
On which all the pages have content like you’ve never seen before.
With all the text areas optimized and all the images properly sized
And graphics that will make your jaw drop down to the floor
You’ll gasp in sheer amazement with your jaw upon the floor
Where it shall remain, forevermore.

But wait, cause that’s not all, this is not the curtain call
There is more that I would show you upon this site that I adore
The youth and kids pages contain, a rather interesting refrain
Custom banners for their ministries with jungle imagery galore
You can hear the monkeys screeching from the jungle imagery galore
Kids will love it, forevermore.

And the website, never crashing, still is dashing, still is dashing
To the top of the list of sites I show my clients from shore to shore.
Thanks to Angie, their web site queen, who shows the church just what it means
To have a website that will draw endless visitors to the door.
For now Morello Hills will have endless visitors at their door.
A line that ends… nevermore.

Although the target audience for this website is actually the parents of our young prodigies, Rainbow Christian Academy brings a decidedly kid friendly atmosphere to their little corner of the internet. The flash events area on the home page gives a glimpse into what the classroom life is like at their school and is surrounded by numerous graphic links in something of a “well organized chaos.” However, by clicking through the different pages of the site, although the background graphics are whimsical and fun, you’ll see that the school has well organized content that makes it easy for the visitor to find exactly what they’re looking for.

faithHighway is proud to partner with Rainbow Christian Academy in their efforts to not only promote well rounded Christian education, but also to make the internet just a little bit happier place to visit. Should Ms. Whitney Houston ever come across this particular website in her internet travels, I have no doubt that she would realize the very children that she sang about all those years ago are, in fact, somewhere over the rainbow.

A quick look at their website (http://www.retrochurch.org) will show you how dedicated the web team at Retro Church is. Their design is both clean and beautiful, and driven in no small part by the user controlled graphics in their home page flash area. This same clean look carries through the entire website, and by looking at their content it becomes clear that Retro Church has taken the time and effort to make sure that their web presence is simply outstanding.

I have often been accused by my co-workers of only featuring large projects whenever Vicky makes me write one of these blogs. However, Retro Church is the perfect example of why I believe our websites can be a great fit for any church. Whether you have a massive website with multiple subsites for your different ministries or a small site for your church that has yet to launch, you’ll have access to the same set of tools regardless. A small website can look just as beautiful as a large one. Should you need proof of that, just visit http://www.retrochurch.org.

A lot of times when I’m working on a large project, I’ll have several different contacts with the church for the different ministry areas. In all honesty, it can be somewhat overwhelming at times when the church has many different people working from their end on the project while I’m the only one on faithHighway’s end managing things. However, in the case of The Potter’s House of Denver, I have met my match in the person of Pastor LaTonya Rodgers. Her tireless devotion to the success of this project is, in a word, inspiring.

The result of the joint effort between The Potter’s House of Denver and faithHighway is an absolutely fantastic site that is already among our staff’s favorites to show off.  I could literally spend the next hour writing about all the features of this site, but I doubt people are going to read my incessant rambling that long. Instead, I encourage everyone to check out the amazing work at http://tphd.org.

A few things you’ll want to check out are:

• Pastor Cartwright’s walkout video on the youth site
• The fun filled flash animations on The Potter’s Word Children’s ministry
• The custom interface on The Potter’s House of Denver Online Store
• And of course, the excellent job that Pastor LaTonya has done on the content throughout the site

I suppose I could provide direct links to all of these things, but I think it’s more fun if you all navigate there yourselves while you’re perusing the site. Plus, Vicky says if I don’t send her this post soon she will commit an act of violence against me.

In seriousness, I encourage everyone to check out The Potter’s House of Denver. It is a prime example of how powerful a ministry tool a website can be when a determined individual uses the faithHighway tools available to their fullest extent.

Last week, we took the new site for St. Peter’s By The Sea Presbyterian Church of Rancho Palos Verdes, CA live. During the production process, I had the privilege of working with Ms. Valerie Ryan, who shouldered the responsibility of populating their entire site with content and did so with flying colors.

Her pages are populated not only with relevant, well written content, but also supplemented by excellent image selections. There are no sections of the site that are blank, thus giving the site a real sense of completion. Val has also populated the flash events area on the home page with relevant slides of upcoming events that will occur in the near future. I’ve found that this area is the true test of keeping a site up to date, as the flash events are the most dynamic area of the most heavily trafficked page on the site. By keeping these current, Val has ensured that site visitors will know immediately that everything they’ll find on the site is both relevant and current.

I truly relish being able to call attention to clients who are truly vested in making their site a powerful ministry tool, and Val has done just that. With church website traffic at one of its peak times of the year during Holy Week, I pray that those who visit the new site for St. Peter’s By The Sea get as much out of it as Val has put into it.

Working with First UMC in Round Rock was a special treat for me, because it gave me the opportunity to work with a church located just a few miles down the road. Most of my clients tend to be in different cities, different states, and in some cases, different countries. Therefore, when I have the opportunity to work with a local church, it allows me to connect with them on a more personal level. When we started this particular project, we were just going to be doing a site for the church alone. During production, the church decided to add 4 subsites for the church’s adult, youth, children, and handbell ministries. I’ve been with faithHighway 4 years now, and I can say without any embellishment whatsoever that http://handbells.fumc-rr.org/ is absolutely my favorite handbell site that we’ve ever built. As a former ringer myself, it does the soul good to see a handbell ministry as a featured ministry. If your church doesn’t have a handbell ministry, I’d encourage you to start one. A collection of people, performing as one, joyously ringing for Jesus is seriously an awesome thing to behold.

The day is fast drawing near when I’ll have to hand over the keys for First UMC to our live team. Even after they have a new account manager, I hope that Betty and her team will still drop me a line from time to time. After all, if they don’t, I can always drop by their church to ask them why they haven’t called!

<Pause for horrified collective gasp>

I know… I know… I can’t believe it myself. Unfortunately however, it’s true. There are, sadly, those out there whose jealousy runs deep in the black cavernous tunnels of hatred they call veins. I know that most of you wish that you had been shanghaied into were able to dispense pearls of internet wisdom known as Best Practices week after week after week with no foreseeable end in sight. That particular honor has been forced upon granted to me though, and to those who would launch malice-driven attacks on my character out of spite, to you I say, “nanny nanny boo boo.”

Most of you, of course, are probably wondering what in the world it is that I’m talking about. “Surely,”  you might think, “Andy is not so desperate to have an introductory paragraph that does NOT mention the weather in Austin that he’s gone off the deep end entirely and developed paranoid delusions!”  No, dear reader(s), I have not. After last week’s post, it was suggested by some that I’d chosen 2 of faithHighway’s largest custom sites to feature, and that I would not dare feature a smaller site. Despite what you may believe, I am not a horse. Therefore, please keep your nay-saying to yourself. The truth is, it doesn’t matter if your site has hundreds and hundreds of pages, or just 5 or 6. Good content is good content, no matter how you slice it (graphic designer pun for the win). Without any further adieu, here are some of faithHighway’s smaller sites that, while small in size, pack enough punch to make the Kool Aid Man give them a resounding “Oh yeah!”

1. Epic Faith Church – When you first arrive at the home page for Epic Faith, you might notice that there is no conventional written content area. Epic Faith utilizes faithHighway’s Ruth theme; a theme being a pre-determined layout with 100% customized graphics. The Ruth layout can be somewhat tricky from the client’s end, as the main image area that dominates the home is under their control. In this case, Epic Faith has done a fantastic job with this area, as the graphics they’ve created in the flash events rotation are a brilliant complement to the banner, button, and background graphics created by faithHighway designers. Moving onto the inside pages, you can see how Epic Faith has created an excellent look and feel within their content areas. Their written content is well formatted, professional looking, and devoid of typos, spelling errors, and other grammatical sins… impressive to even the harshest of literary critics (Hi Mom). All this is complimented by excellent interior graphics that perfectly complement the text around them. Overall, Epic Faith has more than held up their end of the bargain in partnering with faithHighway to create a remarkable looking website.
2. Inn on the Green – While I can already hear the critics sounding their lofty instruments of war about this selection, I will endure nonetheless. If you haven’t figured it out yet by my constant references to this site, it is the website of my parent’s inn up in Middlebury, Vermont. Nepotism aside, it doesn’t change the fact that my mother has done an excellent job with the content on this site. Her experience as a technical writer highlights a point I’ve tried to make often in this blog: the rules of good writing do not change from one medium to the next. In looking at their inside pages, you can see that the Inn on the Green utilizes the same headings, colors, styles, and fonts throughout the site, which creates an excellent sense of continuity. Although they do not supplement the bulk of their content with images, each page is clean, well organized, and is not over populated. In addition to this, the Inn utilizes faithHighway’s Group Content Manager to great effect on their Rooms and Suites page. The tool allows them to describe each unique room at the Inn on one page without creating an annoying long scroll bar.  Finally, the inn features a simple yet effective Virtual Tour page, where images can be displayed in a flash setting with the added benefit of being able to add captions to each section. Although the tour is currently something of a lying abomination since Vermont is under about 20 inches of snow right now, it is nonetheless a dynamic and pleasing image gallery. Overall, Inn on the Green has created a simple yet elegant look to their site by simply observing the simple rules of good, well-organized writing. On a personal note, if anyone would like to scour the site looking for a typo or grammatical error, I will happily plug them and their website in my next blog. The thought of correcting my mother’s grammar is just too good to pass up.

So there you have it, reader(s) and critic(s). Good content is by no means limited to large, custom websites. In the end, although some sites may have many pages and some may have few, it is truly how you use them that really counts. If you think you’re not capable of doing the things that these sites have done, you’re wrong. If you’re a faithHighway client, and are having trouble with the editor, please don’t hesitate to let us know. That is, after all, what we’re here for. That and to write this blog every week amidst nonstop distraction because some of us work in cubicles and not offices. That, however, is a story for another day, dear reader(s). Until next week, may your days be happy, your nights be restful, and your slap shots always go in from strange angles.

Photo By: srqpix

Now that I’ve wasted yet another paragraph talking about something completely unrelated to best practices, a thought occurs to me. I’ve now written 26 articles for Media Outreach on the topic of best practices, whereas you, dear reader(s), have written zero. How is that fair? Why should I have to do all the work here? According to this guy, in order for a relationship to work, both parties must have a vested interest. In the interest of fair play, I think that today I shall let you guys do the work for me.  During my 2 years 11 months 5 days 4 hours and 23 seconds with faithHighway, I’ve had the privilege of seeing some incredible people do incredible things with their websites.  Therefore, on the heels of that nice bit of segue, here are a few of our sites who are complementing their excellent design with excellent content.

1. http://www.meetgrace.org/ – When you arrive at the home page for Grace Church, the first thing you’ll notice is, by design, the flash events area. At the time I was writing this, the very first graphic in this piece is for their sermon series entitled Love: Go for the Gold. This is an excellent use of space for several reasons. It relates to an event that currently has much of the world’s attention (The Winter Olympics), the graphic is extremely well done, and most of all, the dates on the event card are current. One of the biggest fouls one can commit when doing website content is having outdated information on their home page. Doing so will give the impression that the entire website is outdated, or in extreme cases, no longer an active site… neither of which being the first impression you’d want to make on a visitor. In looking at the inside pages of this site, you can see how Grace Church is utilizing a very clean look to great effect. As an example, their men’s page utilizes an excellent looking title graphic to enhance their written content. Furthermore, each inside page on Grace Church’s site contains 2 separate content areas… the main area and a side bar. While this can be something of a large undertaking as it affectively doubles the amount of content areas that need to be populated on the site, it creates both a well organized and good looking inside page. Coupled with the fact that Grace Church features some of the cooler custom toys that we’ve created in the recent past, Grace Church has fast become one of the most shown sites in our portfolio.
2. http://www.coastalchurch.org/ – The home page for Coastal Church is filled with client controlled user folder graphic areas. As you can see, the artists at Coastal Church are extremely gifted in their mediums. However, my favorite part of the home page is their welcome video, which is quite possibly the best custom video I’ve ever seen created by a church.  On the inside pages, Coastal Church has taken user control to a new level by creating their own tertiary navigation at the top of each page. The site utilizes a consistent style through the different pages that is both clean and attractive. As Coastal Church is located in Vancouver, they are currently very much involved in volunteering for Olympic activities, which is evidenced all over the website.  Overall, the high quality of the images, excellent written content, and overall appeal of this website ensures that, although they may not be able to stop American slap shots in Vancouver, they will certainly stop website visitors in their tracks.

Once again I’ve managed to vault past my self-imposed 1 page limit, so I’ll cut it off here for today. These are just 2 of the many churches that I’ve had pleasure of working with who are knocking their content out of the proverbial box. Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking, “Hey… I worked with Andy… why didn’t he talk about my site?” Alas, I am allotted only so much time each week in which to ramble on in this blog. Fear not though, for just because I didn’t talk about your site here, doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re doing a good job. I didn’t even talk about my own parent’s website this week, which I’m sure will entitle me to an, “oh that’s ok Andy, don’t worry about it,” and will entitle my brother to a large share of the inheritance. Until next week then, enjoy the remainder of the Olympics and remember… even though we didn’t medal in curling, life will undoubtedly go on.

Photo By: greg westfall