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Author Archive

31
Dec

Four more free web designs were added to the system today:

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Swirl Swirl Fall

Transition Youth Transition Youth - Bible

Category : System Updates | Blog
28
Nov

Four more free web designs were added to the system today:

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Effeciency Deft Effeciency Reverie

Lamar AD Lamar BC

Category : System Updates | Blog
7
Sep

Two more free web designs were added to the system today:

These designs work great for a variety of uses, everything from generating a lot of articles to just promoting many of your church’s ministries.

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Magazine - Gridz Magazine - Pop

Category : System Updates | Blog
21
Aug

Clover Church Sites vs MinistryWebsites.bizWe recently received a question from a potential client asking us what the difference is between Clover Church Sites and our system here at MinistryWebsites.biz.

A glance of Clover’s service points out a couple things:

1. They charge $1,000 up-front, plus $20/month for the service. With the MinistryWebsites.biz system, there are no start-up fees (save yourself the $1,000) and the basic account starts at only $29/month. That means you’d have to use our service for almost 3 years before you even reach $1,000 start-up fee Clover requires, not including the $20/month you’d spend in addition to that with Clover. Plus, with us, there’s no long-term contract or anything. You can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your account at any time. Although Clover doesn’t restrict you to contracts either, it’s a bit harder to switch to a new service when you know you just dumped $1,000 into it.

2. It’s interesting to note that most of Clover’s sites are built with Flash, which will not index very well in search engines. Since most churches use their sites mostly to connect with new people in the community who are searching for a church home, indexing well for search a pretty big deal. Sites at MinistryWebsites.biz are made to automatically be optimized for search engines and even include tools in the admin area that easily let you customize search engine optimization even further. That doesn’t seem to be a feature with Clover.

3. We noticed that some of Clover’s clients opt to link to their church’s calendar on Google Docs instead of using Clover’s built-in calendar. Not quite sure why that is, but the calendar system at MinistryWebsites.biz can automatically import calendar items from a Google Calendar or any calendar that produces an iCal feed, allowing you to use one main Google calendar and just automatically feed the events you want into your church’s website calendar.

4. We’re also not a big fan of Clover’s video/audio media players, but honestly, it’s still better than what MinistryWebsites.biz offers (although, that will be changing soon). The best solution we’ve found so far is to use the free embeddable FeedPlayer which is better than both Clover and MinistryWebsites.biz’s media solutions. See it in action on my church’s website here: audio and video.

For clients who want to use audio and video podcasts for their church’s website, we recommend that you use Blip.tv to host both the audio and video files since it’s free storage and bandwidth and creates perfect media feeds, especially for iTunes, all for free. Plus, it will convert videos to FLV flash formats that play better on the web.

We also like to think the free web designs for MinistryWebsites.biz are pretty slick. We’re regularly adding more all the time, too! In fact, we have two more “e-zine” style designs coming out within the next couple days.

Other than that, the list of features between Clover Sites and MinistryWebsites.biz are pretty comparable. Check out the list of our features along with some videos that highlight those features.

And, of course, if you haven’t yet, sign up for a free 3-page MinistryWebsites.biz website to use and see what you think. Find out for yourself how easy it is to manage a high-quality ministry website!

Category : Reviews | Blog
29
Jul

Two more free web designs were added to the system today:

These designs work great for a variety of uses, everything from generating a lot of articles to just promoting your church or a blog.

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Ink Magazine Ink Magazine - Blue

Category : System Updates | Blog
7
Jul

Five more free web designs were added to the system today:

Although some of the designs currently contain some sample “fill” content for businesses, they are great designs for ministries. Your ministry’s content and images will easily replace it.

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Atmosphere - InnerCity Atmosphere - MorningLight

Atmosphere - ReBirth

Category : System Updates | Blog
24
Jun

Updated billing systemWe agree — having to manually login and pay via PayPal for your website every month is a pain. With everything else going on in your ministry, remembering to pay yet another bill isn’t something that’s very high on your priority list. Plus, not everyone uses PayPal nor feels comfortable with it. We get that.

So now we have a brand new billing system that is completely integrated with your website. It gives you complete control.

  • You can set up automatic billing.
  • You can easily upgrade your account immediately to any of our packages.
  • You can just as easily downgrade or even cancel your service completely at any time.

To access the new billing system, simply login to your website. Point to My Websites at the top of the screen and select Billing from the drop-down menu. The image below is a preview of what you’ll see. Click “Upgrade” or “Downgrade” for the subscription package you want and follow the directions.

Of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us at sales@ministrywebsites.biz.

Upgrade account

Category : System Updates | Blog
19
Jun

The problem

For many of our users, the jump between the Plus and Pro accounts was a pretty big leap. The price doubled for an amount of web space and pages they didn’t really need. So we updated several of the plans and now offer an in-between pricing plan that should be a happy medium for many of you.

Updates to old pricing plans

We’ve added one extra user to our PLUS plan at no extra cost. All PLUS level websites can now make use of our advanced permission features by allowing another person to login and edit or view specific content on the website. Our PRO plan is also gaining added value with a 100% increase in storage capacity (up to 6 GB) and a 100% increase in users (up to 10 users). All with no increase in monthly cost.

Added a new pricing plan

We also added a new pricing plan called the ADVANCED plan. With 50 pages, 3 GB of space and 5 users, this sits between our PLUS and PRO plans for those who need an increase from PLUS, but not quite a jump to PRO. Of course, the ADVANCED plan includes everything the other packages include, too. See our pricing grid for more details.

Category : System Updates | Blog
19
Jun

Five more free web designs were added to the system today:

Although some of the designs currently contain some sample “fill” content for businesses, they are great designs for ministries. Your ministry’s content and images will easily replace it.

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Aurora Aurora Light

Category : System Updates | Blog
28
Mar

Five more free web designs were added to the system today:

Although some of the designs currently contain some sample “fill” content for businesses, they are great designs for ministries. Your ministry’s content and images will easily replace it.

Let us know if you’d like to change your site’s theme to one of these designs. Of course, you can see a full listing of all the free designs available for use with our system, too.

Kingside Kingside Bishop

Porfolizer Blogr The Machine

Profolizer WhiteLight

Category : System Updates | Blog