Honestly, we want to help churches. Most churches can afford $500. However, if you absolutely can’t, we ask that you talk to your congregation and take up an offering for us, and we’ll be happy with that. If that offering happens to be more than $500 though, don’t give us the extra! Put it into missions or something!

Why is it more expensive to not have Design4Ministry’s Maintenance Package?

We are able to get agency pricing for most non-proprietary technology because of the number of sites that we are making. Because of this, you will still have to pay for everything we build the site with, but you will pay those companies directly without our agency discounts – you also won’t get our team standing beside you to help you along the way.

Our one-of-a-kind smart site develops a page for every tiny neighborhood in your community (and sometimes even for an intersection) so that any time someone searches, there is a page already optimized for that geographic location. We are able to get people to see your site based on their actual location rather than what they search – for example, they may search for a church in Chicago, but because Google uses their exact location, your site will show up better than all the sites competing for the very broad term “Chicago”. In short, your site shouldn’t really need any SEO with our smart sites.

Why do you only offer one hour of web work per month?

Most problems can be solved within an hour for us. The reason for that is that we are already regularly in your site doing regular maintenance (keeping most problems from coming up), so those problems are minimized and manageable. If there is a big problem (pretty rare), we will reach out to you and discuss the situation. Generally, we begin our hourly rate after the first hour.

If I don’t get your Maintenance Package, will you still help me if I have a problem?

We are willing to help. We are in the ministry to help people. However, I am a pastor with a full time ministry, and I have other web clients that do pay us monthly that I give first priority to. We’re willing to help, but we will charge an hourly rate of $95 per hour. Also, because we aren’t regularly maintaining your site, it probably will take a few hours to pinpoint the problem since there are probably other problems causing the problem you’re noticing. Bottom line – let us maintain your site. 

Can’t I just get HostGator hosting?

You certainly could. And you will certainly experience problems. Can you imagine a 15 story hotel – with one single bathroom? That’s what HostGator is. It’s called shared hosting. Think – shared… Lots of websites all stored on the same computer. There’s only a limited amount of computer power, and all the websites are trying to get as much as they can – kind of like mirror space in that shared bathroom. Don’t use the HostGator hotel (or GoDaddy or any of the other popular hosting companies).

One of the things that Google looks at when considering how to rank websites is how fresh their site is. Google likes to see websites that update their website at least somewhat frequently. We don’t change the message of the site, but we do reword it so it shows up a little differently for Google. Believe it or not, this is a huge deal for gaining traction with Google.

Can I update my own sermons or banners?

Absolutely! In fact, we prefer you do. The way we make our sites, you won’t have a difficulty doing that. We prefer if you do the routine changes like putting a new event announcement or a new sermon for the week. That way, if you do it, it won’t eat up the time that we give you in case you run into a problem.

Website Schemas are essentially words or tags in a “shared vocabulary” that can be used by your on-line marketing company (like us!) to talk to search engines like Google & Bing to provide refined searches. The website Schema.org provides a list of these “shared code vocabularies” that are in a easy to use format called Microdata. These are then separated into different categories with their own respective subcategories.