Thank you for volunteering to help beta test the new FaithTree.com! I am so grateful for your help to make this tool I have been working on useful and, I pray, a blessing to those who use it. I’ll share a bit of background below, if you are interested, and then explain the test itself. If you are in a hurry, feel free to skip straight to the testing section, below.
Most of you have probably heard me share about FaithTree Christian Fellowship, but may not have heard about FaithTree.com, which I actually launched 15 years earlier. FaithTree.com started as a Christian alternative to early portals such as “My Netscape” back in 2001, adding Biblical content alongside secular news sources and weather.
Over the years, it started to look worn and forgotten; by 2016, when I was starting a young adult ministry, I “borrowed” the name for that new ministry. However, I didn’t quite have the heart to take that old site offline completely; someday, I hoped, I would make it useful to people again. A few folks still used it every day and I had added a some things to it over the years that kept it useful to my daily consumption of the news, so I quietly left it online. Emphasis on “quietly:” it was hard to use by modern standards and, like an old house with lots of added rooms, it felt a bit maze-like, so I rarely shared it with others.
So what does that all have to do with the beta test you volunteered to help me with? Fast forward into 2020, when online ministry has become more vital than ever and I felt like God was nudging me to make FaithTree.com a useful part of ministry again. I used part of the pandemic season to fulfill the dream of rewriting of FaithTree.com to make it a tool I pray is helpful to you and others, creating a comfortable space to stay up-to-date on our world and be encouraged in God’s Word at the same time.
The all-new FaithTree.com is an almost total rewrite of every portion of that original web site to make it a modern web app for keeping up-to-date on the sorts of things you might want to check daily — news, local weather, stocks, blogs, etc., all without ads, and with touches such as a verse of the day and easy access to encouraging devotionals from FaithTree’s church ministry partners and FaithTree itself.
Everything is customizable to suit your own interests, so I hope you can take a few minutes to kick the tires, try tweaking it to fit your needs and let me know (1) if you run into any bugs and (2) if you see any sorts of content you wish were on it that are absent.
Please start by going to FaithTree.com to sign up for an account then go to this page for some suggestions on what to test. If you already have an account at FaithTreeCF.org (for example, if you’ve donated to FaithTree), you can use that account. Feel free to try the forgot password tool!