March 31st, 2009
First BETA testing is always done by myself with new sites or services. There is a level of expectation I have before I can even let BETA testers see our work. This week I got a chance to play around with the Daily Devotional tool, Blog tool and some of the customization features. The Event Calendar is next on the agenda, followed by the media page. We are exploring additional customizable features in the design, but that is not set in stone yet.
I am estimating about 3 weeks for BETA testing to start, possibly sooner. We still have some remaining openings if your Church is possibly interested in becoming a BETA tester. If you are chosen, you will receive a lifetime thank you of no charges. A free sign up and hosting for as long as you wish to use it.
Posted in Announcements, General | No Comments »
March 20th, 2009
Most calendars on websites work the standard way of allowing you to upload information on upcoming events. Ours adds a twist, or even two twists. Not only can you go FORWARD in the calendar, but BACKWARDS as well. What is the value of going backwards? We have built the system to allow members or visitors to church events to upload images and stories about that event. After administrative approval of the posts, visitors can go BACK in your calendar and recall great memories and moments with images and stories that were shared.
Imagine your next event is coming up and being able to scroll back a year prior and looking at stories and images of that same event and grabbing ideas. Or just imagine the value of allowing visitors to your church’s website to view the images and stories of the fun or caring moments your church shared during an event.
The second twist is the Task Manager in the admin area of the event section. This service is free but OPTIONAL and hidden as to not overwhelm the administrator. But it is available for planning events. When you add an event to the calendar, you can also create a TASK LIST for that event as well. You can then create a series of “To-Do’s” that will help organize a successful event. As you create “To-Do’s” you can simply check them off as they are completed.
This is not a ground-breaking innovation but just another small feature we added to make church websites do as much as possible for the administration and congregation.
Posted in Events and Calendar | No Comments »
March 18th, 2009
Churches need the congregation’s contributions to accomplish activities and goals within the church. This same theory is used when maintaining the Faith Outreach Solutions Website Builder.
Leaving all the duties to just one developer in the congregation, or more than likely one office administrator that does not have web design skills, sets a website project up for failure. But imagine if that administrator could utilize other church members to help.
With the SHARE tool the administrator can designate any other person access to maintain a page WITHOUT access to other areas of the website. So one member of the church can maintain the About Us page, another member can keep the staff page updated, someone else is in charge of the home page, etc. Think of it like an adopt a highway program but for your website. Members of the congregation can adopt one page or pages to keep updated for the church and have access to edit ONLY those pages. So there is no fear in doing damage to pages they do not have access to.
Take it a step further. Posting events can be work. The head of the committee has to submit it to the office. The office then has to post it. If it is incorrect the procedure has to be repeated again and again. With the SHARE tool you could give a user name and password to the EVENTS section of the website to each member of a committee and allow them to post their own events themselves, cutting out the middleman.
The SHARE tool will be a standard feature on the Faith Outreach Website Builder due to be released in just 6 weeks! Your feedback and help to make this a great success is always appreciated.
Posted in The Administrative Area | No Comments »
March 17th, 2009
That is the theme of Faith Outreach Solutions by Prompt Internet. For our entire lives my wife and I have been active in the churches we belonged to. Over that time I have watched technology grow and information spread faster than ever. But even though technology lets information spread faster than ever, I feel that churches have yet come close to tapping into this.
I think the strength of our company and ideas when building this church website builder is that I have been active enough in my church to see what they really need for a successful website. I feel one of the problems is the level of complexity required to maintain websites and that most churches just don’t have those resources. We feel we have a solution for this.
Our website builder will have features such as event calendar, photo album, blog, daily devotional, interactive prayer lists, announcements, video and audio uploads and more. BUT, we give the church the option of how much or little they want. From the beginning our mindset has been:
“Make it easy. Make it affordable”
And we will stick to those principals. In the weeks leading up to it’s launch we will continue to update this blog and let you know more about certain features and how they can help you and your church establish a great website presence.
Thank you,
Kristopher Jackson
President / Founder
Prompt Internet Solutions, LLC
Posted in General, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
