Hey techmate,

I'm quite certain I'm preaching to the choir here, and your comment was primarily aimed at the funny tagline, but you got me going...

I've not heard of Gutensite, but it looks similar to E-Zekiel, Elexio, Oikos, ChurchSites, SiteOrganic and a virtual boatload of other companies who market proprietary CMS'es to churches. The code might be OK, or good, or even be great. However, I wonder why any church would ever consider a solution apart from open source.

These frameworks may be written by an extremely talented programmer. Or perhaps a team of five...or 50...or 500. But they simply won't have the support of a community of developers like Drupal, or Joomla! or even Word Press. They won't have hundreds of folks combing through the code simply looking for security breeches.

Proprietary providers, excellent as they may (or may not) be, won't have the resources to employ thousands of people to actively develop additional functionality. By choosing a proprietary provider, you are locked into using the feature set they have the foresight and ability to produce. When you develop with open source, you can use any of the continually expanding group of modules available to the community (or develop you own). If your proprietary provider goes out of business, so goes your website. When your open source developer decides (s)he'd really rather be a park ranger in Hawai'i, you hire another and any ongoing development you desire continues. (This ignores the many established firms who develop using open source.)

With open source, anyone can download and use the framework for free. If you choose to use a professional developer, the development cost may be similar, but an open source site will be less expensive to maintain. Some proprietary providers charge churches hundreds of dollars per month to host.

I've had admin access to one SiteOrganic and one ChurchSites site. The backend of one, in my humble opinion, was OK (but not great) and the other was horrible. Lesson learned; I'll choose a Drupal install every time.

Blessings!

-NP

I agree with your comments on this. You or I wouldn't even consider something like this.
I can see a church or another organization going with this type of setup because there not tech savy enough to know whats out there. And because of support reasons. While it may or may not be secure,I think for instance a church that has no idea what to do is attracted to a CMS that offers a subscription service. It looks like they host the site and everything. There are probably some support people they can just call up anytime if they have questions. These are customers who probably have no idea what CMS stands for.
If it wasnt for me and this other brother in my Church. I can totally see my pastor going for something like this :)

I really think that Management and Support services for websites are attractive to churches. With a proprietary setup they are paying for support and people as much as for the service. With open source they need someone they can trust to take care of things if something goes wrong.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

My name is Chadwick Meyer, the owner and lead developer at Crate Media, the creators of Gutensite (www.gutensite.com). We're a small company, of no great means (yet), just trying to help our clients with the best solutions for their budget. I apologize for the length of this response, but this decision isn't as simple as you make it out to be. You make a lot of good points in your response. The things you list as potential negatives of a custom CMS are real, e.g. potential security problems, the business possibly folding, a smaller development community, etc. But I think you have a slightly pessimistic view of the various options, including our own. It's not a truism that all things open source are superior.

Personally I love open source, we use Linux servers running Apache and MySQL and our CMS is built with PHP. This allows us to offer inexpensive hosting and gives us the advantage of being part of a large development community. But we also work on Apple computers, running OSX and a multitude of private software packages. I contend that OSX is the best all around operating system. To be frank, Linux, as fond as I am of the idea, is inferior in a multitude of ways when it comes to real world use. OSX on the other hand is a joy to work on, Apple makes me feel like the future has finally arrived. And there is no competition for most of the adobe products. A small team of full time, focused developers can often produce a more useful product than a thousand part time geeks.

The truth is, there is room for both and a time for each. Churches, or any organization for that matter, need to assess their needs, goals and budget and decide what's best for them. There is not one perfect solution for everyone. Joomla! might work for some people, but I don't think it's the best option for clients that plan to do any customization (functionality or design) and who don't want just the basic distribution with one of the free templates.

Open source projects like the ones you mention may have thousands of developers in the community, but what are the quality of these developers? What functionality are they developing? Is most of it even useful to you? Who is guiding their projects and checking the quality? Everyone? Anyone? No one? Sure they have a lot of modules, but most people only need/want a few key functionalities for their site, so the thousands of "options" are useless when it comes to what they need. You claimed that if people use a private CMS like ours, they are stuck with the functionality that exists. But that's not true, at least for us. We specifically planned our CMS to be fully customizable for each client. Most clients don't need to customize any functionality, which is how they save so much money, but if a client needs some unique functionality, they simply need to request it. We are able to develop cheaply because of our framework, and we can either make this functionality available just to them, or if we think it's useful, we can share it with everyone. Our CMS was custom built with real clients guiding its development, and as new clients pay us to customize new functionality, we make that functionality available to everyone that is part of our community. It's not open source in the traditional terms, but it's a coop community that effectively shares the cost of development, and benefits from the contributions of the group. Everyone benefits from everyone else. The development is controlled in house, but the benefits are shared in an open source sort of way.

Regarding security, one of the problems of open source is that anyone can reverse engineer the CMS and find an exploit since the code is public. Sure, hopefully a patch will be forthcoming, but maybe only after the exploit has caused someone real damage. A proprietary project has the advantage of obscuring its code to potential hackers. Security is a big deal, and needs to be important to any development team but again, open source projects are not necessarily more secure, by virtue of the fact that they are big, transparent, sitting ducks.

In regard to the potential threat of the custom CMS solution going out of business, an organization needs to be wise and make sure that they can trust that the business is stable, has solid plans for growth, a good infrastructure, is run by trustworthy people, etc. But give us a little credit, we haven't invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of our life, only to "become park rangers in Hawaii" as you put it. Besides it's unfair to characterize open source projects as more immortal. They change, they break off from one another, one branch may die, etc. And if you use an open source CMS, your hosting company may go out of business, so you'll have to recreate your site somewhere else. No big deal. Plus any responsible private CMS will provide a client with exports of all their data/pages, all their design files, and if a client wants to go elsewhere. No, if you do your homework, you can be relatively confident in the company that helps build your site. If you aren't confident, then find someone that does inspire confidence. Perhaps find someone that has done a lot of sites which you respect, ideally someone that has been in business for 5 or more years, clearly they must be doing something right.

Our Gutensite concept started small. We used to just do custom development for a slew of clients, and in the process developed a lot of code we began to reuse. Then our clients would see work we did on one client's site, and they wanted the same feature. So they had to hire us to customize it for their site. Well, custom development is not cheap. And we found ourselves running in circles updating each custom site with the same stuff. There isn't much job satisfaction in that, which is when we decided to consolidate our code to a shared codebase running on our own servers. This let us save our clients thousands of dollars in development costs, and let us focus on making real progress on new features which benefited everyone, instead of doing the same work over and over and over.

When we first started down this path, we agonized over the decision of whether to base our CMS on an existing package (Mambo at the time) or build it from scratch. We first started doing the Mambo, but we ended up frustrated with the logic of the CMS. We couldn't make pages do what we wanted them to do, it was very limiting. We found it was hard to fully customize every aspect of the design in order to give the whole site the top notch design we demand, and we always felt that customizing the functionality required more work learning how they did something, reverse engineering it, then redoing it the way we needed it to work, than it would take to just create it from scratch from a framework that we designed. Plus, the moment you decide to customize the functionality to any extent, you pull yourself out of the stream of compatibility with upgrades, which defeats the whole purpose of using open source in the first place. Essentially it was fraught with it's own negatives.

For these and other reasons, we eventually decided that it would be cheaper, more flexible, and better for our clients in the long run to build our own CMS that we could control. I too mourned the loss of the open source community and availability of free modules, but the disadvantages outweighed those advantages. I made a difficult decision, one which I questioned during many late nights of programming, but now, 2 years later, I am proud of our product and I have no doubt it was the right decision. Even though our CMS is still in beta, with a lot of planned upgrades to site functionality and the Back Office, even in its current stage I believe the sites we offer our clients are very powerful, empowering, and affordable, whether you take a one, five or ten year view of things. I would guess that others have found the same things to be true.

In addition, you seem to ignore the issue of design, which is as important as CMS functionality. Our clients come to us initially, because they like the work we've done for others. We have a hard earned reputation for great design and great sites that just work. Good design is really rare (believe me, I've tried to hire good designers and they are not easy to find). Clients love us and stay with us, because we have a fully integrated approach to helping them, i.e. building their website, and the same infrastructure and excellent design can be applied to a client's print projects too. If someone wants to use an open source CMS, and they want anything beyond the initial install, they have to find (not easy) and hire a trusted developer and designer (who hopefully isn't the same person), and they'll probably spend more money "customizing" their site then they will save. In contrast, we have a very nice process for our clients, and they can let us take care of all the details. Don't underestimate the importance of that.

Plus, our clients have preferred access to the collective expertise of our team, with full support for their site, at no extra cost. If they need help with anything, e.g. using the CMS, reporting bugs, issues with email, planning and implementing new ideas, etc., they just ask us. We are better than an in-house design department, because we have lots of people, each with specialized skills, available to help. And the cost for all this is ridiculously low.

So those are just a few of the reasons I think that people ultimately decide to use a private CMS option. I wish you could get all the advantages with one option, but unfortunately there are strengths and weaknesses of all the options, and there is no simplistic one size fits all answer. I hope that helps a few people who are thinking through similar decisions.

NOTE: I feel it's necessary to explain that Accordance was one of our earliest clients, and their site has gone through several generations of design and functionality upgrades. They are part of our Gutensite community, taking advantage of our design, support, and development, but they are not actually using our CMS backend. We built their original site before our CMS was programmed, and at the time, they wanted the ability to edit the HTML pages in-house. So their current site is maintained by them, in terms of the pages, links, etc. It's mostly traditional html pages. Eventually they want to use our CMS but for now I've recommended that they keep their current site operating as is, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." It works well for them, and the switch over would require a bit of customization on our CMS Store for adding their checkout filters (help suggestions for their complex product line), and all this would cost them but it wouldn't improve the experience much for their visitors. So it just makes sense to use this site a little longer. But we have several other Stores using our CMS for their digital media distribution businesses, and it works beautifully.

I took a look at what you charge for monthly costs (http://www.gutensite.com/site/...) and when I see:

Extra Storage Space

* 1GB Chunks: $10/mo
* 10GB Chunks: $50/mo
* 50GB Chunks: $150/mo
* 100GB Chunks: $200/mo
* 200GB Chunks: $300/mo
* More: contact us for special pricing.

Extra Bandwidth

* 5GB Chunks: $10/mo
* 10GB Chunks: $18/mo
* 50GB Chunks: $87/mo
* 100GB Chunks: $150/mo
* 200GB Chunks: $280/mo
* More: contact us for special pricing.

I could not recommend something like this to my church after seeing what is available (space/bandwidth) for far less. Your CMS looks very nice but the underlying costs for the space would be prohibitive for many non-profit organizations.

just my 2 cents.

Keith

Thank you Chadwick for coming over here and explaining your views on this and providing information about what your company does and what it has to offer its clients.
I can see how this type of a CMS can be a valuable source for Churches and other organizations. The fact that the support is there for people in my mind is the most important part of a service like yours.
Like you said, there is room for both. I think having open source options and private options available bring plus and minuses with each. Most importantly we have the option to choose these according to our needs. That's great!
Thanks again Chadwick.

One thing you said rings very true with me. What brings many church and ministries to proprietary CMS solutions is support and a name they trust. That makes a huge difference with people.

There are some things I find troubling about your approach.

First, there is the cost model that Keith points out. WOW is all I can say to that expense. What you offer for hosting and bandwidth would work for small churches who don't use multimedia. If a church wants to go down the multimedia route or if they are a larger church your solutions for hosting don't seem cost effective. I'm assuming the large hosting costs are needed to pay for support, security, software upgrades, and that sort of thing. The support you call out as free is really made up through hosting costs.

Second, security is an interesting issue. With open source projects someone can look at the code in search of security vulnerabilities. That's why selecting a project that has a great security plan is essential. One where many eyes look for security holes and there is a way to address them.

But, proprietary solutions aren't better because their source code isn't out there. With so many fewer eyes looking for holes the odds of more holes being out there is higher. And, a decent hacker doesn't need to see the source (though it helps) to crack a site. For many the harder challenge is the one they want to go after.

Even with all the modules out there I find only a handful that would benefit a local church or even a parachurch ministry. They will vary from church to church depending on their needs but there aren't that many of them, this is true.

What makes or breaks a solution for churches isn't the underlying solution (be it drupal of a custom system). What makes or breaks a solution is support, a kind helpful hand, and someone they feel they can rely on.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the closed source solutions because you can't get than many brilliant people together on a closed source solution. But, on a open sourced solution where you get people from all over involved... you can get a number of brilliant people working on it to produce a much better product for everyone to use.

I'm curious where you got your ground up numbers from. They seem a bit scary for churches (scare tactic marketing?). $2,000 a year for average maintenance, server, and support costs seems a little excessive. What are these numbers based on? And, $25,000 for the ground up build? What's this based on?

When if comes to hosted solutions you can get drupal ones from bryght at a significant cost reduction.

I will say one thing for you, your website is fairly good looking as are some of the site templates in your gallery.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

I'm the principal at Edge Media, Inc., the team behind SiteOrganic (mentioned above). I'd like to echo the message that Chadwick wrote above--a very thoughtful, balanced, and accurate response to the open source arguments posed here. I, too, agree that there is room for both. After all, if every church were identical we wouldn't need thousands of churches around the world, would we? :)

If you're a church with a PHP guru on staff (or at your beck and call), and that person is an expert in Information Architecture, visual design principles, patient and efficient troubleshooting, and system administration, then WOW--you have found your Web solution. If I had a person (or a team) like that, I wouldn't dream of paying someone outside.

The reality, however, is that about 99.5% of churches find themselves without such a talent resource. And even for those churches who do have some talented volunteers/contractors, one of the following will usually happen:

1. Volunteer/contractor gets burned out
2. Volunteer/contractor experiences a life change that means he/she is no longer available
3. Volunteer/contractor loses interest

Let's consider prices for a moment.

I'm not here to defend the pricing for Gutensite, SiteOrganic, or any other professional firm. But if I'm a church administrator deciding between paying around $2k to $3k per year for a reliable, accountable firm--vs. paying nothing (or peanuts) for a volunteer who may be incredibly dedicated--but is still a volunteer--I'd have to really think about that. As the old saying goes, "anything free is worth what you paid for it."

Again, lots of churches make it work with the open source toolbox. But you've got to consider the value in what your vendor firm is providing you. After all, your Website is THE most important piece of marketing and communications coming out of your church. How much is that worth to you?

If it's worth anything, I'll throw in this little tidbit: our #1 most popular client profile is a church who has been using open source. That's right--they've tried getting along for free, and finally have decided that they'd gladly pay a company to set them up with an easier, more ministry-focused solution that is backed up by real, live human beings who care about them.

Finally: here's something to ponder. When evaluating a volunteer, programmer, or even a firm... If you're a church or ministry, is there value in knowing that your vendor is staffed by a team of Christ-followers, who are passionate about your ministry? I say yes.

A lot of the technology doesn't really vary between a Christian or secular user, but there are some very compelling things you can do (especially with a Website CMS) when it's written specifically for ministry. Ask us for a demo if you're interested in learning more. :)

We've been in this business for 7 years. We've served hundreds of churches and ministries, and we're thrilled with all that God has allowed us to do. We're more expensive (in the short term) than a do-it-yourself Drupal or Wordpress site, but we offer so much more. And, we consider each project as a ministry endeavor. It makes me feel great that I can sit on the other end of the phone from a church and honestly tell them that every single person who touches the design/code for their Website is a believer.

Can't say that about open source.

You make some interesting points and 99.5% of churches most likely don't have the talent resources they need.

I do have to say the most important form of marketing and communications from a church is not it's website. The most important form of marketing is the lifestyles of the people at the church and the most important form of communication is word of mouth. No matter how good or used a website is nothing compares to these.

Like I said before, support is key for many churches. But, for many churches they can have a drupal site built fairly inexpensively (like from a company like Mustardseed Media) and have it hosted for hundreds of dollars a year rather than thousands. And, they can get support for less than thousands of dollars a year. My point is, I question the price model comparison.

I wonder if it is best to have Christ followers as the people who build your site. Here's my delima. I'd love for people to chime in on this one. On one hand you have Christ followers and they understand certain things about the church. On the other hand using someone who isn't a Christ follower provides an opportunity for outreach. It provides an opportunity for people to see what's happening in church. Do you really need a Christ follower or just someone who can understand a church enough to create a kickin site for them? Thoughts?

Now, all this does point out an interesting business proposition. Take Bryght as an example. They do drupal hosting, in a similar fashion to the custom CMS hosting talked about here, for $19.95 USD a month. That's $240 USD a year. There's support, upgrades, etc. I can imagine with a certain extra care and support for church this going up a little. So, does anyone want to do hosted drupal for churches?

Something interesting about the CMS solutions we have now is the flexibility they provide. Churches do have some unique requirements but I'd suggest they are few. What kinds of things do they need that aren't being done elsewhere? What are their unique requirements?

The two big benefits of a hosted solution are people you trust for service and support and not having to manage the software/host. Is there anything else I'm missing?

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

This line of thinking is really getting my brain juices flowing. So, I'm going to blog about it this week. The first post is up at https://www.innovatingtomorrow....

I'd really love to get everyones thoughts on this.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Thanks for your critique of the disk storage costs. To be honest, we haven't thought through the pricing of space as much as we would like, and we always want to be flexible and fair. In putting together those prices, we just tried to reflect similar costs that we saw other hosting providers offering, and made sure it covers our costs as well in a sort of graduated scale. We'll revisit this and try to see if we can provide a better price list. But the truth is, our service is extremely well priced overall and we've never had anyone complain about costs. This is probably because up until now, no ministry has ever needed more than an extra GB of space. So I would imagine this is probably true of "most" ministries storage space needs. If someone had needed more space, we would have likely heard some complaints and addressed the issue then.

Also server space doesn't have to be expensive, but like all things, you do get what you pay for to some extent. I never use the cheapest options in anything I do, I don't believe in that type of business, for one, and I don't believe it's cheap in the long run. I also believe in paying a fair price for things, and if someone is offering something really cheap, they are probably cutting corners. So we may pay extra for our own hosting, but I'm happy with the support we receive.

Also, something else to consider with hosting, is not just the "space" available, but the type of server it's running on, CPU processing, RAM, and RPM of the hard disk. Sometimes you are comparing apples to oranges, if you are just comparing cost of "space". 500 GB on a 7200 RPM ATA RAID hard drive may cost $100/mo somewhere (if have dedicated hosting), but 73 GB on a 10,000 RPM SCSI RAID-5 hard drive will be $135/mo. You are paying for the quality of the hardware, speed, etc.

Media Temple and Joyent are two quality companies in the hosting world you can compare prices to. You can check out their pricing and what you get for it at:

http://joyent.com/accelerator/...

http://www.mediatemple.net/web...

In both cases bandwidth is measured in TB they offer so much. A TB of bandwidth isn't easy to use up... but it sure is fun to try.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Couple Responses to your points.

STORAGE COSTS
I've made some modifications to our upgrade costs for storage. These may change depending on upgrades we do to our servers and the costs involved, but hopefully they are more competitive. I'm sure there are "cheaper" solutions out there, but I think they are reasonable, and I think the total costs for most churches would still be very affordable. It takes a lot of MP3s to to make 1 GB.

SECURITY
I don't believe that proprietary solutions are "more secure" because they are closed source. Of course not. I believe in the benefits of open source in this regard. But I just made the point that open source isn't 'necessarily' more secure than proprietary solutions (countering the original point made by nonprofit). Secondly, as important as security is to you and me, lets be honest. Most churches are not going to be the target of hackers. And if they were, most of them don't have any secure information that would be dangerously compromised (most pages on most sites are all public anyway, and the few that have a private church directory, that information is already available through other free means online). I think it's a bit of a scare tactic to try to make a bigger deal about security than needs to be made. It's more likely that someone will walk into the church office and nab the church directory from the counter, than hack into the website.

BRILLIANT PEOPLE
I'm not a brilliant coder, wish I was, but I'm not. But I'm a hard worker and I have a few good ideas, and I'm able to organize processes that help us develop and help us server our clients. And from my experience, that's how most good things get done in the world. I'll be honest, our CMS isn't brilliant. There are a lot of things I want to improve, and other people might ask "why did you do it that way?", and I'd say "made sense at the time." There are some moments where we are extra proud, but mostly it's just a useful tool that gets the job done. Like a wrench, not very advanced, but invaluable at its job. It's pretty basic, in it's logic and implementation. We built a framework that lets us deploy things more rapidly, so that helps, but mostly it doesn't require a genius to make a CMS. It just takes a lot of hard work! And when we develop new functionality for clients, I've yet to meet a project where we couldn't come up with an elegant solution. So my point is, I think the point about a huge open source community is a red herring as well. Building functionality is not complicated, it's just tedious.

GROUND UP COSTS
I despise scare tactics and exaggeration, so I hope our estimated figures don't come across that way. Our estimate of $25,000 for a comparable custom designed site, I think is actually extremely conservative, and based on our own experience. We've done a lot of custom work for clients over the years, and we have friends in other companies that share their experiences with us, and it's not unusual for sites to cost $50,000-100,000 to custom develop. And those sites don't have more functionality than what our clients have available (sometimes less functionality). Pricing estimates are always going to be "general", because every project is different and the level of customization a client requires (not to mention how picky they are) can increase the cost of a project by 500% or more. There are too many factors. But there are still clients out there that want to build something from the ground up, so they can dictate the way every aspect of the site works. And if you add up the man hours, multiplied by the hourly rate, you get to $25,000 very quickly.

I admit most churches wouldn't dream of doing a custom site for $25,000, but our marketing is not church specific. We have clients from many sectors, and many of them do want to spend that kind of money. We are simply comparing the functionality available, with a similar custom site. We aren't comparing our costs with an open source project, because we don't have that information. I don't honestly know what a really customized open source site would cost. My guess is though, if they customized it as much as we are able to customize our sites for our clients, it would be a lot higher than what we charge. Just because we have such great control and integration over every step of the process, and our CMS is built for customization. Plus we know our own framework so well. Maybe someone can give us an estimate for a site like one of our sites, e.g. how much would you charge start to finish to design, build and customize a site like this:
http://www.carriagelanepres.org/

An interesting phenomenon we have found, is that when clients find out our estimates are much lower than they were prepared to spend, they end up taking their budget and using it to add a lot more features than they were planning. So that's always a nice surprise for them.

In regard to the yearly operating costs, I think those are minimal as well. If you send $15/mo on hosting ($180) and you require an average of 2 hours of help a month, from an HTML developer (to update your site, or make basic changes) and he only charges $75/hr, you will spend $2000/yr. That doesn't include any support, and that's just a basic static HTML site without much dynamic content, or a CMS where you can control your own content on your own schedule. We have some independent clients (and had a lot more before they joined our Gutensite community) and they usually spent a lot more than that every year. Their costs have reduced dramatically.

I respect your commitment to ensure that every person on your staff is a believer, I think that's great. But I really think it shouldn't be a motivating factor for churches, although I'm sure it will be appealing to some churches, and each church will decide for itself. But I think it's inconsistent for a church to demand that of a web developer, but not demand it of the people who build their worship facility, or print their brochures, or cut their lawn, or provide their telephone service, or build their computers (and servers), or staff the countless companies that a church does business with.

In regards to the other points you made, I appreciate the thoughts. It's nice to know that others have had similar experiences. I think the actual CMS, although it's important, is only one small part of the package. It's the people you work with, the support you receive, the quality of the work. That's what ultimately matters to most clients.

In Brad's Defense, I think he probably referred to marketing in the traditional terms, i.e. media related. In fact some people may be offended at the suggestion that their lifestyle is "marketing". Certainly we all understand your point though, people are drawn to the church by the people they know (but people will use a website to find directions and may be turned off if they don't like what they see).

I completely agree that security can be used as a scare tactic. But, church sites do get hacked from time to time. I didn't used to think that this happened until I came across a church/ministry website that had been hacked and I saw the page before they got it fixed. I doubt this is very common and I've only seen it once. It is still something to consider and I don't think that should be used to scare churches.

If you check out my blog post you'll see I'm in agreement on the ground up costs being higher. For something rocking I can imagine going over $100,000 USD.

The comparison I don't see is next to a system like drupal or joomla. I don't know what costs like that would be but they are closer to a proprietary systems like yours than a home grown solution.

One of the things in the drupal world, in Dries (the father of drupals), and my own is to setup environments where they don't need to hire anyone to make changes to their sites. Where churches don't need to hire someone for $75/hr to make changes to static pages. Eliminating or reducing this gives churches much more freedom at a lower cost.

When I look back on every piece of code I've written I want to make changes and improve it. I think every developer is this way (or should be). In an effort to create the best products we should think that way to be constantly improving.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

@Chadiwick
"It's more likely that someone will walk into the church office and nab the church directory from the counter, than hack into the website."

The primary security concern with the typical church site (where the vast majority of data is already public) is not keeping sensitive information private but preventing the uploading of malicious content.

Blessings!

-NP

@Brad
"But if I'm a church administrator deciding between paying around $2k to $3k per year for a reliable, accountable firm--vs. paying nothing (or peanuts) for a volunteer who may be incredibly dedicated--but is still a volunteer--I'd have to really think about that."

These are not the only two options and ignores the many established firms who build using a platform other people understand.

Blessings!

-NP

@Chadwick
"But give us a little credit, we haven't invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of our life, only to "become park rangers in Hawaii" as you put it.'

That comment was in reference to the OS freelancer. It was in no way intended to imply your firm, or any other, was unstable.

Blessings!

-NP

@Matt
I'd love for people to chime in on this one...Do you really need a Christ follower or just someone who can understand a church enough to create a kickin site for them?

I can see both sides of the fence:

As a designer: I work primarily for churches because I want my life's work to have a lasting effect. Designing for widgets, nice as they may be, can't offer me this.

As a church member: I want my leaders to seek out the best and most cost effective solution. I'd much rather have them purchase toilet paper at a large retailer than from the more expensive church supplies company. I'd rather have them develop an incredible website with a secular firm than an adequate one with Christians.

Blessings!

-NP

A greater security threat for churches sure is someone walking in and just taking something.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Hello,

I am the other programmer at CrateMedia, and I'd just like to throw in my two cents:

One thing I've always found very hard in this profession is having to quote what we, as programmers, find "fair". To me, something that comes as naturally as walking and talking, that I've found myself doing in my sleep at other times -- I wouldn't find paying another person $100/hr. to create a PHP module very fair -- whereas to someone who has no real understanding or training, or even logical perception of, would find it reasonable if it furthered their business, church, or personal medium in the long run.

I've had quite a few bad runs with software companies; I come from a more C/C++|.NET|application-oriented comfort-zone, but I have to say-- I've never found a company with the ideals and philosophies as that in which Chad has mapped out for us. He truly cares about each client, and will spent all night fixing any error for someone when all of us would have turned in or gone to bed. Or, another instance being, he spent all-day on a holiday which the rest of the team was off (Memorial Day) making sure Accordance's site was live and perfected. That kind of support and caring, is far worth the pricing and time spent on each project.

We are quite small, yes, but I think that's also an advantage -- you know where and what each person is working on and when it needs to be done by. It's a lot more relaxed than a larger company, and that in turn makes one strive harder to get their personal work done and well-kept.

Don't get me wrong, I love open source -- as a C++ programmer, it's how I've learned as much as I have, but also with open source comes laziness. If people stop caring how their code runs just because someone else wrote it, so therefore it MUST be right, doesn't mean it's optimised or even the best way of doing it. Or perhaps some day that way will be depreciated and what happens then? You're left with inferior code with no idea how to update it... It's also bad practise, in my opinion at least, to leave it to others to maintain your code simply because it's open source. Where's the fun in that? How do you learn from that?

Open source, to me, is a funny thing at times. Open source proponents love it, at times, for no apparent reason ... or simply they love it because they can have a one-up on someone who uses a closed-source program. I love Linux, but really, some of the most annoying people I've talked to who find themselves "way better" at everything -computers- have to rub it in your nose, as a .NET developer that your OS is inferior.

With great code, comes great responsibility.

Thanks for your time.

Techmate,

What a great thread, man!

I think that some church's need hand holding and there are some really good CMS/web firms that do that. Others have the in-house OSS expertise and can still have the option to farm out portions of their web work to firms like Mustard Seed Media... or some will do it all themselves.

Our church was using a proprietory CMS/web company, but we moved over to Drupal and our own designs a year or so after becoming a part of the ministry. I am slowly building a creative tream to help me out. Of course, I reserve the right to recommend that we out source as needed when volunteer resources diminish :)

I guess the most important thing is for a church to be honest with its resources and make a choice accordingly.

Thanks!
Shrop

Ya but for most people TB is a marketing gimmick. No one is going to use that kind of bandwidth, which is true of most hosting companies that have virtual hosting (shared server space) like Media Temple, people pay for a lot of space they don't actually need/use (but it makes them feel like they are getting a good deal), and the company can offer more than they actually have room for because no one uses the space they pay for. That's good marketing I suppose, but it doesn't reflect actual costs. And it's apples and oranges, our CMS isn't a hosting company per se. We have a dedicated server, our own server, and so we pay for the space and the bandwidth up front and we pass on the costs to our clients in a realistic model. The numbers on MT are bloated, and don't reflect actual costs of server space and bandwidth.

Also we could never use a company like them for our hosting because they only offer shared hosting. It doesn't look like they offer dedicated servers, for the reasons I mentioned above.

My two cents.

Thats great if your church budget can afford to build an awesome creative team in house. Most can't. I used to work for a very large Ministry head quartered in San Francisco and our web team consisted of... me. At the time, I was not even very good, but for the salary they paid me, they could easily have partnered with a great firm, and gotten top notch designers, programmers, etc for a fraction of the cost of my salary, instead of just one person with mediocre skills slowly hacking away. That's the beauty of hiring a team, is that you get all their combined talent (and time), and you only pay for the chunk of their yearly salary.

Part of the process of using open source is selecting the right tool for the job and part of that is looking at open source items and seeing if they are stable, who the developers are, and what the outlook for the modules is going to be. Unless you are an open source programmer and are comfortable making sure there is a path forward for what you use. That's part of the reason I use drupal. I either select modules I know will have a future, ones I am comfortable making an upgrade path for, or ones I am willing to build and maintain myself. Of course, if you want to be sure there is a path forward you can always find someone great and pay them :)

There is an element that comes with open source which you can't get in closed source and that's collaboration. For example, I helped webchick update the jQuery Update module for drupal for the most recent release. The solution we came up with was better than either of us would have come up with on our own. In a small closed development environment this luxury is lost.

Again, I want to point out that I'm not against closed source solutions or for open source solutions. I am for the best possible solution for churches.

Most of my criticisms of solutions can be applied more to products and solutions than development tools. And, as a developer I am the most critical of the plank in my own work. But, the issue often comes with church solutions (across the board) being several years behind the industry and being more like corporations than extensions of the people and mission of God. I'm not pointing any fingers, just making a broad generalization.

As for anyone's dedication, that's a double edged sword. I applaud Chad for taking care of his customer. But... I'm also wondering why a church needed their solution so quickly that Chad couldn't have a holiday. And, by Chad sacrificing for his work what other callings was he sacrificing. I find it amazing that churches need their websites so quickly and can often lack patience. Again, a generalization and not something I'm saying in this specific case.

For anyone who doesn't know $100 USD is not a lot to pay for a good software engineer.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

The angle we need to not forget about is the in between. There is doing something in house, there is going with a company that has a solution, and then there is outsourcing to someone like Mustardseed Media. This last direction is one we need to keep in consideration.

Please note, I'm not an employee of Mustardseed.

My personal style would be to setup a church website for a church in a way that they need little to no support for a few years when they want to update/add features to the site.

I don't want to play down any options. They can all live together in this world. There are more than enough churches and more than enough work. Let's just give all of them their due.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

We are moving to a media intensive world. It's one completely taken with audio and video. If a church of 1,000 regular weekend attenders podcasts their sermons and bible studies and puts the occasional video online, going over 10 GB of bandwidth isn't hard at all.

If a church really wants to engage in Internet ministry going over 20GB (thanks to media) isn't very hard.

I realize that these numbers are inflated. But, 5GB of bandwidth is easy to blow through.

I'm a server guy at heart. I've managed my own servers for years and even do custom tweaks in my hosted environments (bandwidth constraints and costs forced me to stop hosting my sites myself). Companies like Media Temple and Joyent use Virtual Private Servers. These really need to be compared to dedicated and a specific dedicated solution. A virtual server doesn't say what hardware specs are powering it just the way the software is configured. Media temple has virtual private servers where the single server has 8 Gig of RAM, a quad core xeon processor, and more powering it. This is a much more powerful solution than many dedicated solutions and it's much more portable.

I'm just trying to point out that a virtual server doesn't really compare it to a dedicated solution. There is more in the mix than the name.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

@Chadwick
"Security is a big deal, and needs to be important to any development team but again, open source projects are not necessarily more secure, by virtue of the fact that they are big, transparent, sitting ducks."

Obviously there is nothing inherently superior about making code public—It's the community surrounding the project which makes OS shine. I'm not familiar enough with the Joomla! or Word Press communities, but Drupal is powering many high profile sites. Why would Universal Music, Nike, FedEx, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Yahoo!, the United Nations, Warner Bothers Records, Fox, and many other huge organizations develop using a platform that's a big, transparent, sitting duck?

Blessings!

-NP

Just to clarify, our creative team are all volunteers. We are blessed to have very good talent in the church.

Thanks for all of your input Chadwick. This is an awesome thread!

Shrop

There is so much great information in this thread. Thank you Chadwick, Brett and Brad for your interaction on this topic such an great thread.
Thank you

Thanks to techmate who kicked us off and thank you Chadwick, Brett, and Brad who have brought a very valuable perspective to this discussion. (Please consider becoming regular contributors to these forums.)

I'm certain we can all agree; the church does not use technology as effectively as it could to share the good news of Jesus Christ and anything which helps it communicate more effectively; proprietary solution, OS consultant, or volunteer, is a good thing.

Although the details may change from region to region, I suspect similar trends are universal. There are approximately 100-120 Christian churches in my city:
•~5% of area churches have what I would consider decent websites (based on a quick glance at their homepage)
•45% of these have crappie sites
•If the remaining 50%+ are online...I could not find them

•I get frustrated with my church's proprietary site whose performance and backend stink.
•I have been frustrated with a high-dollar provider whose lack of customer support was remarkably bad.
•I get frustrated many church leaders don't make the net a higher priority.
•I am frustrated with coders (OS and proprietary) who do not adhere to web standards and sell table-based sites which do not validate.
•I am frustrated with church leaders who don’t know or care about web standards.
•Most of all...I am frustrated with myself who all too often dreams big and delivers small.

Blessings!

-NP

In that particular instance, it was a bible-software website, that had a current live version that we had to switch over to a new version (of CMS and Design). The client wished to switch over on a day that would require less traffic (being a holiday) and Chad ended up spending the day with the client making sure everything was up and running. Open-source forums and documentation can only take one so far, and don't really place you with a trusted professional to make sure everything is up and running on your own site.

great thread!
I know this has been stated throughout this discussion, but here's my quick "broad stroke" viewpoint on this:

the KEY to any church website is "service." A church needs to know that it has the service and support it needs.

With that said, my opinion on going with a closed system is the problem of locking into a specific company. The service from that company may be good now, but what about a year from now? However, if the system framework is open, then the church is flexible to use other companies to service/support their website.

If I was a church, I would look for a web development co. with great service and uses an OS framework. It simply puts me in the most flexible position.

What do you think it would take for you, your church, and others to not just dream big but produce?

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com

Hey Matt, Calling me out...that's a good question.

Collaborate: Finding others to teach and learn from. Finding the right people to partner with on the larger projects.
•Geeks and God has been an incredible support
•Meetup.com has also been great
•The Drupal forums have been wonderful

Knowledge: Design standards. Web standards. Project Management. What do churches really want and need? What trends are hip (and which are worth following)? Knowing enough about the various frameworks and other tools to always suggest the best solution.
In heavy rotation at the moment:
•Web Project Management by Ashley Friedlein (thanks for that one)
•CSS Cookbook by Christopher Schmitt
•Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk/Matt Westgate
Awaiting the The Lullabot Learning Series
Looking forward to your conference

Time: Using my time to benefit myself and others instead of killing hours in unproductive pursuits. Knowing the balance between "going the extra mile" and getting buried in the details. Staying on task. Enjoying my family and not always multitasking time with them and my next project. Striking the balance between producing great work and completing it in a timely and profitable manner.

Money: Changing my financial status so I have enough margin to spend time on work that is not directly billable. Relieving some of the financial stress and channeling that energy into creative and productive projects. Learning to sell.

Communication: Listening. Understanding need. Knowing how to best instruct non-techs how to leverage technology for the gospel. Talking about open source without becoming a jerk. Glorifying God in all that I do.

Drive: Always wanting to do the above. Always wanting to serve.

What a great question.

Blessings!

-NP

You are not alone NP! Well put..

Shrop

Thanks, Shrop. Blessings! -NP

Been awhile since we talked about Gutensite. This is what CMS Accordance Bible Software website is running on.
I re-visited their site and see they are now offering a Lite Version which is FREE.

Yes we've been offering a Free Lite Version for almost a year now, but we've been doing so much development we haven't done any promotion (other than our own site). We've got a few good templates people can use for free (many more coming soon), or if you need something customized you can pay for a bit of customization on a template (as a cheap starting point), or do a full blown custom design (recommended for professionals). But we're hoping the free lite version will be useful to youth groups, small churches and organizations, personal sites, start ups, etc. It's a great way for us to get our name out there and offer a good service for people in the process. Hopefully if people like what they see, they may recommend us to their friends or upgrade when they get a budget for something more professional, e.g. Accordance Bible (which is now on the latest version of Gutensite).

Truth is, the free lite version is not really very "lite". It's runs off the same CMS, same features, etc. It's just not private hosting, you don't get custom designs (but free users aren't really going to pay for custom design anyway), or free support. But as we work to make the Control Panel much more user friendly (we finished a major facelift this week), and eventually get good online help and forums, that may be less needed. We want it to be so easy my mom can use it.

FYI, we just finally turned 1 this week, reached our goal of version 1.0 with a major functionality and design facelift for the back office. It's still not super sleek AJAX (yet) but it's beautiful and robust and functional. And we feel like it's ready to start promoting. So I hope a bunch of people check it out and give us their feedback and if they like it tell their friends. This is just the beginning, a lot of great new things are underway.

This is a fascinating debate as usually these debates start to get quite immature etc.

I am the head of interactive for an advertising company in Toronto Canada. Our company has been using Drupal for 2 years now, I've been developing in it for about 3 years now.

I only really wanted to comment on this:

"Maybe someone can give us an estimate for a site like one of our sites, e.g. how much would you charge start to finish to design, build and customize a site like this:
http://www.carriagelanepres.org/"

Agency pricing... Approximately 15 - 20k
Freelance pricing... Approximately 3k. The site is virtually Drupal out-of-box. I would then negotiate a maintenence contract with the client, so the grand total would probably be around 4k.

The notion that an open source developer or freelancer cannot provide support is bothersome to me. As long as both organizations are transparent in the beginning everything should be fine. If I say to a potential client "As far as support goes, I work Mon - Fri 9 - 5, but am available to you after that" Then the client should not have any higher expectation then that. If I promise "48-72 hour turn around time on support requests" (which is in line with any large company) then there should be no problem. If said church or company would rather pay a retainer or a fee built into the web site invoice to cover support, they will most likely get the same amount/quality of support as the quality freelancer. There are as many crap-quality corporations offering support out there as there are crap-quality freelancers.

I come back here to check on the progress of this discussion from time to time...

Carriage Lane's site was just a very basic project, custom design home page with secondary page shell (they added their own content). This would run $3500 at our current pricing for basic custom design from scratch (as opposed to hybrid from one of our free lite versions). All the rest of the site was created using the CMS tools to build basic pages or add content to existing special feature pages, e.g. multimedia library, blog, calendar, home page promo modules, etc. Then a church like them would pay $70/mo for hosting, email, licensing, unlimited free support for help and training, and technical management of the website for security updates, bug fixes, technology upgrades, and the never ending stream of new features and upgrades to our CMS which all our clients take advantage of.

We have Freelance rates, but top Agency quality design and functionality. No single freelancer can provide the wide variety of design, programming, and support that our entire team can provide. What makes us different is that we have an entire framework that we develop our sites on, and we control the environment. So this allows us to do things more efficiently. Because we have a core code base, we are able to continue development of our product in one place and everyone benefits from the upgrades. So websites are not stranded in cyberspace only to be abandoned and then recreated in 5 years when someone finally realizes how badly outdated their website has become. With Gutensite, in 5 years your website will be much better than it was when you built it, you'll have access to far more functionality, a far superior Administrative Control Panel, better pricing, better design options, etc. As our company grows, and as our CMS improves, you benefit.

Plus there is a reliability with a company like our own, which is harder to find among freelancers. Certainly freelancers can provide ongoing maintenance, but we have a dedicated team that does support and who can tap into our programmers expertise, we have hundreds of clients relying on us daily, and our model is profitable, so we are going to be here when you need us.

Oh, and we have great Free Lite Websites too, with some great free designs. It's a great place for a small church without a budget to start, and grow from there.

Here's a great case study:
Neighborhood Bible Church, San Jose CA
http://nbcsj.gutensite.com
Monthly: Free Lite Version (cost = $0)
Design: Free Design Skin (cost = $0)
Built: someone in the church did all the work on their own with no help from us. (cost = $0)
End Result: A pretty great website!
They like it so much they will probably go Pro so they can get their own private hosting and customer support plus access to other upgrade features like donations, calendar, etc.

City Church of San Francisco
http://www.citychurchsf.org
The numbers below are just standard costs of what someone could get at a comparable value (for privacy reasons).
Monthly: Non-Profit $70/mo
Design: Basic Custom Design ($3,500)
Built: they added all the content, and we spent a little bit of time following up behind to enhance the design of some content pages.
Result: A great designed website with lots of functionality and long term performance value.