“You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” (Matthew 5:14-15)
Your parish community is alive both online as well as in person, and the two halves can work together to connect people and grow your community.
We have been working with parishes for over 15 years to help to nurture and cultivate their online presence as easily and painlessly as possible.
We offer parishes both new website development as well as website updates and maintenance for current websites.
With so many church website programs to choose from, what makes us the right choice for your parish?
We are NOT free! (but we are low cost)
But wait … isn’t that a bad thing???
Free is … well, never really free. Nowadays, there are 2 different types of free website programs offered for parishes:
Programs promoted by marketing companies, who will be posting advertising on your website,
and
Programs offered by diocesan organizations, who will be controlling the content on your website.
So “FREE” really means loss of content control.
But … is it worth it? Check this out …
A few years ago I was meeting with a pastor who had a free parish website, and I happened to check the website in the morning before our meeting … and saw a very disturbing ad displayed on the website.
When I met the pastor, he wanted to know why he should pay for a website when his current one was free, and I passed him a printout of what his website looked like that morning. Needless to say, he was more than happy to write a check to ensure content control in the future!
We do NOT use “custom” software
But wait … isn’t that a bad thing???
Custom software – developed by a company just for parish websites – sounds like a really good thing, but in actuality, it is a very limiting thing.
You see, if your website is built using custom software, that means that:
- you can only use features that are included with the software – if you want something different, you can’t have it
- you are “stuck” with using the same company forever, as they own the custom software
- should that company go out of business, your website will be useless
Instead, we code all of our parish websites using WordPress – It’s the world’s most popular content management system, and it powers around 43% of all websites on the internet.
By utilizing WordPress, your parish website can be flexible to evelove with your needs. There are over 55,000 different plugins that can help your website to do everything from integrate calendars to organize a fundraising auction over 3 continents. You will NEVER run out of possibilities with a website built with WordPress.
Plus, if you ever want to leave, your website can go with you – ownership of your parish website is totally yours … forever!
We DO make your website easy to edit … but you certainly don’t have to edit it yourself.
Really … you’ll help me???
All church web companies and organizations promise you an easy-to-edit website, but do all actually DO the editing for you?
Website editing has come a LONG way from when simply adding contact information meant coding in something like this:
<strong>Contact us by <em>email</em> at <a href=”mailto:info@annunciodeus.com”><span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>info@annunciodeus.com</span></a> or <em>call us</em> at <a href=”http://5164484993″>516-448-4993</a>.</strong>
Ah – those were the days!
Now, ALL new websites are created so that even a technophobe can simply enter their password to log in and be able to see (in plain English) what they need to do to make changes. However, just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean that you have the time, desire, or inclination to make your own edits. Plus, you may want something “out-of-the-box” – a slideshow, trip registration form, sale of parish t-shirts – something that you’ve never done before, and have no idea how to approach.
We have developed editable website for hundreds of parishes, and yet 75% of them have us to edits each week – items like:
- posting weekly bulletins
- changing homepage highlights to reflect the news and activities of the parish
- posting photos of the events of the past weekend
- updating calendars and schedules
- and so much more
Think of how much time is saved by parish staff members who simply email, text, or even CC us on correspondence and the changes are automatically completed.
And if 75% of parishes have weekly changes made (and sometimes – many times per week for the very active parishes), 100% of our parishes contact us at some point during the year for something like:
- setting up a capital campaign on the website
- fixing an issue that occurred from an on-site staff member edit
- creating a new section/access codes/pages for a new staff member
- changing up the headers and look of the website to reflect parish changes
And since our websites are coded using WordPress – the world’s most popular web content management system – anything a client sees on another website can be integrated into their own – the sky is the limit!