Last night Faith Ministries launched the new faithlafayette.org site. Faithlafayette.org is the first of Faith’s 10 sites to receive an upgrade; additional sites will come online in the following months.
The New ‘Launchpad’
The original faithlafayette.org was intended to help people discover the various ministries of Faith, and provide a quick way for people to drill into the ministries’ sites. The new site continues this purpose, but moves forward in a couple of ways.
- First, the ministries are grouped (in the top bar) by category, and this list of categories will remain at the top of all the new sites as they come online. From any page on our new sites, it will be easier than ever to find all of Faith’s other ministries. This is convenient for people familiar with Faith, and important for visitors who are new to our ministries.
- Second, we decided to bring shared information together. Items like events, blog posts, Twitter feeds, job openings, the staff directory, and even the entire resource library–can be found on this central site. Each ministry will still have their own ‘slice’ of these items when their new sites are built, but now you can see a snapshot of what’s happening across all the ministries.
Highlights
Resources
The Resource Library holds over 1000 resources spanning multiple decades of sermons and lessons. The upgrade to the resource library brings additional ways to find and share resources. At the time of launch, nearly all of the resources are available, but full cataloging is still in process. As the cataloging project is finished in coming weeks, the number of resources listed under each topic, keyword, and book of the Bible will increase.
Events
Faith is taking a small step toward an online events calendar. Significant upgrades to the calendar are planned (it’s really just a list today; no ‘calendar’ view), but today you can find the most significant upcoming events from each ministry for the next few months.
Connections
We want to make it easy for you to share a great sermon with your friends, subscribe to updates you’re interested in, and discover all the places you can find content (like picture galleries, videos, and blog posts). So you’ll see familiar icons for Twitter, Facebook, and other services.
We’re Just Getting Started
The first site is live, but not finished. We’re far from done.
We already have a long list of additions and changes that we’ll be working on beginning immediately. In fact, we’re probably making changes as you’re reading this. And we’ll be listening to feedback and tracking stats to learn what needs to be changed.
As mentioned before, individual ministry sites haven’t been upgraded yet. You won’t find all the church or school information on this site; in fact, you’ll fairly quickly be linked back to the old sites after just a few clicks. It’s going to be several more months before the project is complete, but you’ll see consistent progress.
We hope you find the new site helpful, and we look forward to hearing from you so we can keep improving it. We’ll be listening for your comments below, as well as via email, Facebook, and Twitter.