General Questions

Once you decide you want to sign up with us, you would send us an email telling us who you are and that you are interested in our services. This starts the following process:

  • We will send you a link to make the first payment.
  • You are sent a form to fill out that will help us design your new website. Once completed, we will go over everything on the phone and give you all the advice/feedback we can on it.
  • We make first draft(s) of your homepage design based on your form and send it to you.
  • We go back and forth until you are happy with design.
  • We implement finalized design into our special church website content management system.
  • We code site around your specific needs.
  • We transfer over all text content from your old site (or word documents you send us) into new website and help organize/design it to look as good as possible.
  • We give you admin privileges (along with a link to our help website) where you can start adding sermons and time sensitive items like calendar events and announcements.
  • You go through website to make sure everything is how you want it.
  • You tell us to take you live once we give it over that one last look!

One thing that sets us apart from many other companies is that we work on the weekends and our business hours are from 9am-11pm. So if you write to us at 10pm EST  Friday night with something urgent, we will respond to you that night. No need to wait until Monday.

Oftentimes you can even reach us by live chat until 10:30pm est.

All the content on the site that you’ve written, and the graphics you have added yourself are your property. The graphics that we have created as well as the layout are ours and cannot be taken with you until a period of 18 months is over. Once 18 months have passed, you may take the church website design and any graphics we have created for you and do whatever you want with them. Because we don’t make you sign any long term contracts, it is too easy for people to use our services, take all our work, and then leave soon after. This is our way of protecting ourselves from this.

No access is given to our servers to download any software the runs the site. It is your responsibility, should you decide to leave, to transfer all content and images into your new site.

Once your website is up and running, we will have you create an account on your website. We will then assign you to be an administrator, which will enable access to all the features that come with the site. You have access to our full online help of video tutorials and step-by-step text help on how to use all the features the site comes with.

There are some settings that are not documented however due to the nature of every site being unique in how it is setup, so if you need help with something, we will be glad to guide you through it over the phone.

Because each site is uniquely customized to the needs of the church, the amount of time it takes to complete a website can vary greatly from church to church.

On our end, first drafts of the design can take up to 1-2 weeks to complete. We then go back and forth with each church to tweak the design to make sure everything is to the church’s liking. Once the design has been approved, we begin work on putting it into the system. This process takes another 1-2  weeks.

Once the design is in the system, we enter the content phase. This is where we will collect the content you want us to transfer into your new site and input/modernize it for you. We also tweak the website system around your specific needs. The completion time of this content phase is unknown because churches can take anywhere from 0-52 weeks to get us all their content.

All in all, from start to finish, you CAN have your website up in about 5 weeks.It all depends on how quickly we are given all the initial content.

Both! When we are doing the design, we will provide our own stock photos or use yours that you provide, as long as they meet a certain standard (we can also enhance the photos in photoshop if they don’t look good at first). This allows us to maintain the high quality of the website look. Because we set ourselves apart from other church website creation companies by not only offering an easy to use content management system but by also offering extremely high quality designs and layouts, it is important for us to have this control during the design process.

Once you go live, you are free to add your own photos within the site, but we just ask you be mindful to try to use as high a quality of photos as possible 🙂

You get unlimited pages! There are no limits on anything in the system.

We will transfer over all text on all the pages of your website. Not only do we transfer it but we organize it and make it nicer looking, formatted better, and more modern, if we can. If the church has usable images on the content pages, we will also transfer those and oftentimes enhance them in photoshop to make them look more professional.

In regards to media data, we will transfer up to the past 3 months of sermons, up to 5 forms, and up to 10 photo albums. It is up to the church to add the rest of those, through the easy to use system we offer.

Pricing

This is a one time design and setup (split into 2 payments) only cost of website development that covers:

  • Unlimited phone, chat, & email conversations to get to know you and your project fully
  • Full church website design based on whatever you want (but agreed on ahead of time). No templates you are locked into.
  • Constant feedback & guidance to keep your site professional/user friendly
  • Unlimited revisions to our first draft
  • Setup of design into specialized church website management system (CMS)
  • Software customized around specific needs
  • Adding / editing / enhancing photos you send to us
  • Coding custom design into tablet / phone platforms (responsive)
  • Full content migration, organized, modernized, and laid out professionally
  • Editing of content you send us for easier end user reading
  • Best SEO practices for higher website ranking
  • Creation of custom graphics to promote website: use on social media & in church

To see all the features you get for the monthly cost, you may go here: Features Page or Pricing Page

If you look around at church website providers who offer a good, easy to use, church content management system, you will notice they all charge a monthly cost. This is not something unique to Mychurchwebsite.com. This fee is NOT the cost of hosting. Hosting is included free.

Mychurchwebsite.com, like the others, are basically a SAAS company (software as service). You are renting the use of our specialized and easy to use  content management system we have assembled specifically for churches, with all its many features that work together (ie. advanced calendar, sermon manager, galleries, forms, etc). Using this is a completely different experience than what you would find with off-the-shelf open source systems. Without the use of the content management system you would not be able to easily update any content, assign staff editing privileges per page, calendar items, audio/video files, etc onto your site.

Keeping your site updated behind the scenes so that it is secure at all times is no easy task. The monthly cost enables us to offer upgrades, support, and maintenance of the content management system you are using, since there are many software/security updates being released all the time as new vulnerabilities are found. Religious sites remain the top hacked sites of any other, so we take this threat very seriously. Without someone proactively monitoring and updating, your site is left open to be hacked.

In summary, we are a full managed solution that takes the load off of you. You get access to 7 day a week support that is always here to help fix a problem or offer guidance on best ways to accomplish your goals. It’s a very personalized one on one experience.

Note: For churches with over 1000 avg weekly attendance, and thus very high web traffic, there is usually an extra $20/month charge to cover the cost of a single dedicated server that ONLY hosts that site. This ensures your website stays running fast.

In order to have full control over the content management system and ensure that it  remains secure / works properly, we need to host the website on our dedicated cloud servers. This not only lets us easily troubleshoot any problems that may arise but also enables us to add features you request, upgrade current features, and guarantee you that the system as a whole will work properly.

Your monthly fee is also payment for the use of our specialized, easy to use content management system. If you were to host your site on a different web host, the content management system would not be available for you to use.

First half payment is due on on starting the project. The second half payment is due 2 months after first draft is sent (or if you go live before then).

For the mobile app, payment for first year of $588 is due up front for churches who are also clients, since we waive the normal  $400 setup/design cost for them.

The prices on our pricing page are the average price of an average church website. We do offer discounts to churches that fall under 150 avg attendance but we also may charge more than our regular prices for churches that are large and contain a lot of content, due to the project size / scope / specific functionality that is often required.

When we speak to you more in depth about your project we can determine cost more specifically.

Website Manager

Training is not required because our system is so easy to use. But we do offer training, nonetheless, if asked.

We also give you access to our text & video tutorial help website to help you along the way and to guide you. Most of the features are simple and straightforward however, and can be used by anyone with minimal computer knowledge. If for any reason you need help or have problems, give us a call, email us, or contact our live support online.

Yes. Adding an image to an article or section of your website is easy. The interface for typing out your content and adding images is the same as your average word processor program. To add a picture, you can simply drag the image from your desktop into the editor. You can also add your own slides and photo albums or import your photo albums from Facebook. More detailed instructions are found on the help website.

There are 5 default groups in the system people, 4 of which can edit content on the site. We can also make custom groups for you with different permissions, if needed.

The 4 default groups are:

Registered: CANNOT edit or submit content to the website. This is the user group automatically assigned to users who register through the front end of your website. This is usually for your normal church member. They CANNOT see the front end control panel.

Author: Can only edit the page you assign to them and nothing els

Editor: Can submit and edit events to the website, but the submissions will not go live to the site until they are approved by the administrator

Publisher : Can submit and edit events to the website instantly without any approval

Admin : Full control over website. No limits.

Yes. If you want to update your site with a completely new design, it will normally cost between $1400-$2600 (which is about 40-60% off normal price!). All your content will automatically fit into the new design with our system and will not have to be reformatted.

Some churches just want to update the existing design with a few changes. We can also do that for minimal cost… usually around $200-450, depending on complexity.

If you cannot figure out how to do something with the website, please contact us and we can either show you how to do it through our live chat online support, or do it for you… for free! Telephone and email support are all available for existing clients.