Website Walkthrough & Tutorials
This course kicks off with walkthroughs and tutorials on how to use our website. Each lesson has its own video that takes you through an area, or a few areas, of the site so you get a feel for how things work and what's available.
The lessons ahead go through the different types of content - the FAQs, the blog, events, documents, and educational content like courses and lessons - and what makes each one unique and why it matters to the fellowship. There's a look at the media library, how to watch videos and documents in there, and how that can be useful when you're studying. There's also your user account area: managing your contact information, updating your membership, or canceling it. Search gets covered too - the search in the top navigation, the media library, and the community forum. On top of that, the note-taking features built into the system for tracking your progress, the commenting integration with the community forum that ties into articles, lessons, and events, and how access works depending on your membership type or whether you're a guest.
We put this together to help every guest and member actually understand the website, both what's there and how to use it. Second, it's supplementary to a lot of the written FAQs; sometimes a video gives you ten times the support that written instructions can. It's also a great resource to help guests and non-members see what's included in the membership. Being a private organization and really walking the walk, a lot of the content has to stay private, but it can be hard to decide about becoming a member without knowing what's involved - so this adds some transparency and a peek at what's part of the membership while keeping what's needed to stay a private organization.
The whole site runs on a content management system built in-house to run the website for the ministry and its integrated auxiliaries, like HOMF. It's a labor of love built for guests and members, and the hope is that you know everything that's been made and how to use it. Any questions, leave a comment if you're a member or reach out through support if you're not.
00:09
Welcome everybody. This course is a series of lessons that are walkthroughs and tutorials on how to use our website. Each one has a video that'll take you through an area or multiple areas of the site to give you an idea of how things work and what is available. The lessons in this course will walk you through the different types of content, like our FAQs, blog, events, documents, and educational content like courses and lessons, explaining what is unique to each and how those matter to the fellowship.
00:45
We will go over the media library, how to watch videos and documents in there, in a more holistic sense, how it might be useful for studying. We will go over your user account area, things like managing your contact information, updating your membership, or canceling it. We will go over the search features on our website, which includes this one in our top navigation, our media library, as well as our community forum.
01:12
We will talk about the note-taking features that we've built into the system to help you track your progress and take notes to assist with your education. We will go over the commenting integration that we have with our community forum. So much of our content has commenting features that are integrated into things like articles, lessons, and events, and those go hand-in-hand with our discussion in the community forum. And we will also go over how access works, so based on different membership types or being a guest.
01:49
So why make this course? For starters, this is to help all of our guests and members understand the website. That means knowing everything that's available, as well as how to use it. And second, this is supplementary to many of our written FAQs, including video on how to do these things. So sometimes the video can provide 10 times the amount of support compared to reading through some written instructions. And last but not at all least, this is to help guests and non-members understand what's included in the membership.
02:25
Being a private organization and truly walking the walk, much of our content needs to be private, and at the same time, we know it can be hard to make a decision about becoming a member without knowing everything involved with that. So this course helps us provide additional transparency and a peek into what's part of the membership, while maintaining what's needed to have the status of a private organization.
02:53
This website runs on a content management system that we built to manage the website for our ministry and its integrated auxiliaries like HOMF here. This is a labor of love built for you guys, for our guests and our members, and we want you to know everything that we've made and how to use it, because it's fulfilling to know that it's being used and helping people.
03:16
So if you guys have any questions on these, feel free to leave a comment if you're a member or contact us through support if you're not. We are here to answer all questions and build our community, so we are very glad to have you.
Lessons
A quick look at the articles, or blog, section, linked from the main navigation. The blog lists articles newest first with publish dates, access-restriction icons, comment counts, and category filters. Individual articles often end with cited authorities and carry related media, related content, note-taking, progress tracking, and forum comments that only members can see.
A short tour of the FAQ section, reachable from the main navigation. The FAQs page lists every question, with category filters and a search bar, and each answer expands in place. Individual FAQs also have their own pages showing related content and media, access-restriction icons, and a comment section that feeds into the community forum.
An overview of the courses and lessons. Courses are arranged in a suggested order but can be taken in any sequence. Aach course and lesson page carries a featured video, a written transcript if available, related content, access-restriction icons, and progress tracking with notes. Also covers lesson resources and the paid multi-day educational webinars, which are supplemental events rather than courses.
A walkthrough of the events section, which holds hundreds of hours of recordings and is the site's most prolific content. Covers the two event types - biweekly Master-member sessions and monthly all-member meetings - and the schedule on which recordings are released to other membership tiers. Also covers the event listing and its search filter, which searches video transcripts, the layout of an individual event page, and how to register for the paid educational webinar recordings.
A walkthrough of the Documents section and the system that generates documents customized to you by filling your information into templates. Covers how documents are organized by section and jurisdiction, what's on an individual document page, and a step-by-step of generating one - creating it, filling out its form with validation and notes, previewing with your information highlighted for proofreading, and saving, which locks everything so later changes need support. Also covers reaching all your documents, including your membership agreement, from the user account area.
This lesson shows how to use our media library by covering its features and functionality.
A look at the Fellowship's online meeting room - a Zoom-based space where members can jump on a call together for a more personal conversation than the community forum allows. Covers how to reach the room, how to start a meeting or join one that's already open, and where it fits alongside the regular monthly and biweekly meetings.
An overview of the note-taking and progress-tracking features across the site - collectively called engagement. Content and its attached videos are tracked separately, each with a three-state status and its own notes, and the same interface shows up in the media library. Also covers the content engagement and media engagement pages in the user account area, which summarize your current and all-time status across everything you've worked through.
A rundown of the different ways to find things on the site. The header search covers all content types, can be narrowed by the membership level an item requires, sorted by relevance or publish date, and also searches video transcripts. The media library has its own search across videos and documents, and the community forum — members only — has a full search with extras like filtering to posts by a specific author.
An explanation of how the community forum ties into the rest of the site through the commenting system. Most of the main content types - articles, FAQs, documents, events, and lessons - has a comment section at the bottom of the page that reads and posts directly to the forum, and comment counts show up as a word-bubble icon throughout the site. The forum itself runs on the self-hosted, open-source Discourse software.
How to recognize older material on the site, which falls into two categories. "HoMF 1.0" content is work from roughly mid-2025 and earlier, before the Fellowship shifted its philosophy, is flagged with an icon and an on-page notice linking to an article that explains the shift. Archived content is simply material that's been superseded by something newer, and it only appears in search results and the sitemap, not in normal listings.
An explanation of why much of the site's content is restricted, and how to tell who can see what. The two main reasons are legal - a private membership association is expected to engage the public only in limited ways - and protective, keeping members' contributions away from AI scraping, copying, and profiling. Access icons on content, along with filters on the search page, the media library, and the sitemap, let you see which role or membership type each item requires.
A guide to the Fellowship sitemap, which turned out to be one of the best ways to see everything on the site at a glance. Covers the collapsible sections for content, media-library items, and the community forum, plus the controls for filtering by title, including or excluding archived content, and viewing what each role or membership type can access.
A tour of the membership status page in the user account area, where you set up, review, and change a membership. Covers choosing a membership type and contribution schedules, using a card or bank account, and reading your membership details and history. Also explains changing your membership type and how upgrades and downgrades are handled, cancelling and reversing a cancellation, updating your payment method, and more.
An overview of the everyday account settings you manage from your user account area, along with a few tasks that don't fit neatly into the more focused walkthroughs. Covered here are updating your login details, keeping your personal and contact information current, and reviewing your payment history and saved payment methods. There's also some guidance on what to know before making a payment, including how to handle payment types other than a card.
The three ways to get help: emailing support directly, submitting a support ticket through the contact form, or - for members - starting a topic in the community forum. Anyone who submits a request gets a user account created so they can log in and manage their tickets securely, though most support can be handled entirely over email. Members are encouraged to use the forum for anything non-private, since it grows a shared knowledge base.