The look is very good, and it navigates friendly. Not sure the pricing structure is in line with similar services, but your service may be better, so who knows? My church currently pays $50 a month at Church Web Works. There's a bunch of open source guys on here who would think that''s too high, but since we already had that conversation with the creators of Gutensite and SiteOrganic, hopefully you'll be spared a repeat! Still, that thread is worth checking out, good stuff there.

Also, your opinions on Church Marketing will be worth hearing as well, as that is a somewhat hot topic on this site at the moment.

Overall, I think other similar services offer a slicker presentation, but yours is clean, easy to navigate, and that will appeal to a lot of pastors. Unfortunately, many pastors misunderstand and misuse their websites. One of the focuses of this community is educating pastors on the opportunities for discipleship and community that a good website can provide. It can be more than a simple advertisement for your site.

Hope this helps!

Blessings,
Tony

I agree with Tony, it looks nice and navigates pretty well... I would be much more inclined, if I were in the market, if there was a demo (maybe there is and I just didn't see it) and if you would get your code validated.

Overall I think you are on the right track for sure although pricing might be a bit out of line?

Anthony,

I appreciate your honest feedback regarding our site. I have read through a few of the open source conversations here, and I would hope we can avoid a topic take over here. :) We provide a service based on a hosted CMS solution, I believe open source has its place (we offer Joomla based sites for clients who need more), it is not the end-all solution. Just my two cents.

Back to your feedback, I appreciate your comments in regards to pricing. I want to make sure our clients understand they are not just getting a website, a template, or a CMS, what makes the difference for us is that they are getting up to five completely custom graphic design images included with the offering, every month. If you ask any graphic designer what they will charge for 5 separate marketing assets, they could charge anywhere from a few hundred dollars to over a thousand if their work was quality. Maybe I need my team to focus our website marketing to highlight that feature a little more than what is currently on the site?

From my perspective, I am really not concerned with the hosting package a user chooses, our margin is the same. I want to make sure that the church is not paying for something they wouldn’t use, for example, having an unlimited amount of users, when the church only really needs one. That would save the church some money and not limit the features of the site.

I really appreciate your feedback and welcome as much as you are willing to give.

Thank you,

Jesse Orndorff

Hi guys.

Simple Church Marketing does offer a free three page site (www.simplechurchmarketing.com.) There is a graphic that links to the sign up page from the home page, right at the top (it's blue.) Also, you'll notice the free "demo" package available if you click on the "pricing" page. Also, there are no time constraints around how long you can use the "free" 3 page site.

Hope this helps.

T

I just have to chime in on the design of the site. Absolutely beautiful. Kudos to your designer!

@Dalerus great design. Give your designer props. That's fantastic.

If you are really looking to provide a service to help churches in their ministry and not just looking to sell a product than that's good. I use open source but a lot of ways to help the church need a business model to keep the people doing the good work financed to feed their families. So, if you charge reasonable rates and do good work that's solid.

Matt,

Thank you for your feedback.

You said: “If you are really looking to provide a service to help churches in their ministry and not just looking to sell a product than that's good.”

I couldn’t agree with you more. Our vision is to provide a valuable service to the church, granted it is a product that we sell, but that allows for me to feed my family, and continue to develop better ways for the church to reach more people. We are even offering free sites to missionaries and those who have a real need for a website.

The one thing that has bugged me for some time is how the church views vendors in relationship to costs. Having worked in churches, I have seen unreal amounts of money spent on newspaper ads, radio and a few TV spots, but most churches are unwilling to invest a $1000 in a website that will market to a much wider area, has measurable results, and designed to drive people to their site and contact them.

Looking at some of the feedback it appears price to be an issue, or at least a stumbling block. That is good to know. I want to make sure we are pricing ourselves within a reasonable area, but I also want to make sure we are comparing apples to apples here. We are not just a template company. As Anthony said, his church uses ChurchWebWorks. They are a great company, also Seattle based, but their offering is not the same as ours, sure you get a template, a hosted cms, and pastor tools, there are a ton of companies offering this. My focus is always marketing, be it digital or print, how is your church communicating your message and vision to your community? I want to fill the gap between just a website, which I feel like most churches have, to a tool that will allow them to reach more people, without taking time away from what a pastor needs to do: lead his/her church.

This is all great feedback, we already are working on changes to our site to reflect what has been said here! Please keep the feedback coming!

That's a great looking site, Jesse. It also 'feels' right. By that I mean that I would feel totally comfortable using your company because your desire is for the Kingdom and not just a cookie-cutter template service that could care less if anyone was ministered to.

For all you provide, I don't think there is anything out of line on the prices. At the same time, coming from a small-ish church I can see how they would feel that "*yawn* just a website" may not be worth the cost. It is a definite battle to get the generations to meet in the middle and be open to newer technology and methodologies.

Since you are a business, never feel bad about your price! The Word (1 Tim 5:18) says "The laborer is worthy of his wages." So many people are cheap and want Christians to work for free. Sadly it's often churches that expect this.

I just wanted to update everyone here! Your feedback has helped us make some modifications to our offering! We have re-structured our pricing scheme to better reach a larger audience of churches. We understand that not all churches need graphic design elements included in their sites! So I am happy to share with you a new price offering. It is as follows:

$59 a month, for our basic package
$69 a month, for our core package
$109 a month, for our advantage package
$169 a month, for our ultimate package

All these price points include all features of our CMS system, one new template offering a month and basic SEO to get your site started! We will be offering our design services as an add-on option, as well as our fully managed solution where, for a flat fee per month, do all website updates, maintain SEO on a monthly basis, unlimited graphic design, and management of your social network profiles.

Please, please, let me know what you think about this new offering and our site! Your opinions matter to us!

Thanks everyone!

Dalerus,

Wow!! Your site is amazing!!!!

I keep hearing, "What direction do you want to go with your site?". And that's a great question. I want it to NOT look cookie cutter! Even thought I'm happy to have a functioning cookie cutter site! ha ha ha.

I like how your buttons or icons have that 3 dimensional look with the shadow. And I love the reflection bit. And I like the 'handwriting' look at the top of your page!

I'm in the process of getting there myself with custom themes...But I'm still learning.

Interesting price of $1,000. I have been wondering what it actually costs to design and setup a website. And I'm sure the price varies depending on customization.

Ever since people have found out that I'm working on a website, people want me to build them web sites. And I don't have the knowledge/experience to be comfortable in calling myself a "web designer" yet. I'm happy to be volunteering for Youth With a Mission in Hurlach, Germany. But anyone else is going to get a price quote ;-)

Again, You have a really cool site!

I'm liking what your doing with the site and don't really have any extra value to add to the comments above, apart from the demo point, but I guess your thinking is that they can sign up for the free 3 pager to test the system?

The tech issue I spotted is the nice search field you have on each page, in FF it's showing the presumably hidden text "search". IE and Chrome don't appear to show the full word but there is something peeking through.

Hope this helps.

Dreamleaf,

Thanks for the info! I will have our dev team take a look that that issue!

We really appreciate the feedback everyone! We are continuing to refine our product and offering. I will have some cool things to share with you all soon.

Thanks!