I recently had the pleasure of working with Kathy Chapman Sharp and Laura Bennett to create a new website for Franklin Heights Church (FHC) powered by WordPress. Kathy, a leading church communicator and ministry marketing expert, and Laura, a talented graphic designer, needed an experienced web professional to complete their team to build a new website for FHC, so they approached me to work with them on this project.

FHC is a  church that has been around for many years and has seen phenomenal growth over the past few years, including adding 2 additional campuses to their main campus in Rocky Mount, Virginia. They needed a new web presence that covered all 3 campuses and would continue to grow along with the church.

We chose WordPress as the content management system for a number of reasons. First, the church's existing website was already built on WordPress, so their staff and volunteers already had some familiarity with the system. WordPress also offered the tools they needed to effectively communicate with their members, so it was the perfect choice for this new site.

The website features a custom theme built from the popular Underscores starter theme based on Laura's design in Photoshop. I was able to design a custom content structure to build out the church's content using Custom Post Types UI and Advanced Custom Fields, and we integrated The Events Calendar to provide event management capabilities. The site also uses RSS Aggregator and Feed to Post to automatically import the church's weekly sermons from their existing podcast tool, Libsyn.

Everything in this project was designed from the ground up to make it easy for the church to manage their content and use their website as a key tool for effective communication. The end result is a beautiful website that will continue to grow as FHC grows.