This month, faithHighway is excited to feature Metroplex Chapel in Euless, TX. To check out the site go to www.metroplexchapel.org. This site has a wide array of tools, features, and design elements. Some of the major ones are a SermonConnect Gold Package, a Photo Gallery, Custom Graphic Design, Custom Home Page layout, and a Virtual Tour. We recently spoke with Pastor Scott Fisher about his ministry and how the website has impacted it. Read below to see what he had to say:
Tell us more about Metroplex Chapel
Metroplex Chapel is a twenty-six year old congregation in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex — we are at the southwest corner of DFW International Airport. It’s a church with a passion for worship, for discipleship, and for outreach — we want to introduce people to a life-transforming gospel of Jesus Christ and nurture them in their faith journey. It’s a mature congregation with a broad range of age groups with lots of children, youth, and adults across the age spectrum.
Tell us about your website and your experience working with faithHighway
This is the third version of our church website over the past ten years — the previous two versions were total disasters! I am convinced that a church must have a great website. It must be dynamic, interactive, and kept up to date — for small to medium sized churches the challenge is getting a site designed, up and running, and maintained in a cost effective manner. Most small to medium sized churches either depend on volunteers, existing staff, and/or well-meaning third party vendors.
faithHighway is set up to handle any size church’s needs. For the small church with a tight budget, a good looking and functional site can be up and running quickly, is easily maintained, and is affordable. For the medium to large sized church, the needs are different with greater expectations in design, functionality, and number of pages. A custom designed site is, in my opinion, best. It’s hard work, requires a focused attention, and lots of collaboration.
My experience with faithHighway has been excellent. As we began the process of developing our new site, we had an amount in mind that we could spend on the site. As we got into the development of the site and became more and more familiar with what faithHighway could do and what constituents in our congregation were wanting to see, we had to make some tough decisions — we added some things and rearranged some things. Ultimately, we spent more than we had originally planned, but the expense was well worth it. Our congregation loves the site and uses it regularly. We are adding new things to the site on a regular basis and giving people a reason to come back.
The ability for me and my staff to maintain the site was a key selling point for faithHighway. They’ve been great to work with and the site has exceeded the expectations of our congregation! Working with faithHighway was working with a team — from conceptualizing what we wanted and how that would function, to designing the interaction of the site, its look, feel and functionality, various team members played different roles in helping build our site. At every step of the way, we were able to ask questions, get feedback, compare ideas and determine what best met our needs.
What other things are you doing that are helping make an impact throughout your community?
Several things we currently do:
1) Highly visible “JESUS” flag that can be seen from the freeway — the flag is on a 70′ flag pole and is 20′ x 38′.
2) Street pole banners that identify our location as a place to worship.
3) Direct mail — four-color postcards on a consistent basis to the 10,000 surrounding households (3 to 4 times per year).
faithHighway is excited to be part of their church marketing solutions. We would love to hear from you about your own faithHighway website. Feel free to email your own answers to these questions about your ministry. Be sure to include your church name, location, denomination, and size, as well as what your experience working with faithHighway was like, and in the next few months, you might just see your ministry being featured here! Email us at feedback@faithHighway.com.
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I read an article in my Time magazine this week titled “How to Save Your Newspaper.” As more and more news makers are making their papers and magazines available for free on the World Wide Web, there is a decline in the readership of hard copy newsprint.
