In response to my last post, “Going All In on Squarespace and Weebly (Sort Of)”, Jim at Berkely United Methodist Church in Austin shared his church’s new site built on Squarespace. They were a church who suffered through a hack on their WordPress site that resulted in a lot of work and downtime. They are…
When I first started as Director of Communications and Media for the Rio Texas Annual Conference, I wanted to find one church website solution that I could offer to most every church. Finding a “one size fits all” solution proved more difficult than I imagined. After months of working with local churches…
At the risk of putting myself out of a job, I still have to tell you, technology is not going to grow your church… all by itself. You still have to tell people about Jesus. That doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t have an essential role to play for the modern disciple. My mission is…
Here at the Rio Texas Media Center, we do a lot of website evaluations. Rio Texas Churches can submit a form and we will review their church website and offer an evaluation with suggestions for improvement. When I get a chance, I like to go back and see what they did in response. Sometime last year,…
This week a colleague of mine shared a fantastic post by Carey Niewhof entitled, “5 Disruptive Trends That Will Rule 2016.” It is a great piece, if you get nothing else out of my post, go read his. I was really struck by the first trend he shared, “Church online will become an advance, not…
Whether or not you are one to make New Year’s resolutions, the end of the year is a good time to take stock and think about the year to come. For church folks (and my non-profit friends,) this might be a good moment to think about some plans for 2016 in the area of technology….
![Technology in Rio Texas [Survey Results]](https://i0.wp.com/pastorwill.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/speed.jpg?fit=768%2C517&ssl=1)
As part of the plan that created the new Río Texas Annual Conference, our annual conference committed to ensuring that all of our local churches have the required tools and infrastructure to stay connected to the conference and their mission field. The unification plan called for all churches to eventually have the internet connection and…
Do you want more people to visit your church? Your church’s website might be the most important tool you have in the effort to reach new people. I spend a lot of time visiting church websites. I mean a lot of time. I wrote a piece recently on “Barriers to visiting a church.” I wrote…
It has been a while since I posted in my series “Rio Texas Websites that Work.” It is about time to look at some more websites in our annual conference that are using the web to reach the mission field. This week, Spring Creek United Methodist Church. This website has a lot going for it…
As I have been thinking, reading and learning about e-learning, I had a chance to do some face-to-face training here at the Mission Vitality Center. We had 12 people attend training on Saturday to get started with new church websites using Squarespace. The training was sponsored by the Hill Country District, but we had attendees…
