DIS & FWS Blog

Posted on May 18th, 2012

A New Look for Faithwebsites, The Same People, The Same Great Service!

by lisag

You may start to notice that we’re getting a new look around here – we’ve updated our Faithwebsites logo and will be working on updating our website later this year. Today, we’re excited to introduce our new logo to you – the symbol of faith with a stronger and more modern look that better represents who we are!

If you see this logo on a few things – don’t worry – it’s still the same great people, products and service you have come to know and trust. We are blessed with how many years some of our customers have been with us and realize that a new logo could be cause for alarm! There has been no change in our company or the people within our company; we will just have a new look.

Our new logo better represents us in today’s market and technologies… yet our mission has not changed. We are here to help Churches, Christian Schools and Ministries build great websites!

Posted on April 26th, 2012

Instant Mobile Website – New Product Release

by lisag

If you’re following us on Facebook, then you know it’s coming – mobile websites for your current FWS or DIS site!

Here’s a sneak preview of what our product will offer:

  1. Instant. What do we mean by “instant”? You can mobilize your site in seconds. Yes, the domain work and the setup work has to be done first – but, don’t worry – we’ll help you out with that. The actual work of taking your existing website and making it into a mobile site takes only a moment.
  2. Maintain Only One Website. Most of our customers already have enough work just to keep one site updated – so we made sure our product has content and design updates that feed from your current site. Do a job once – get it out to both sites.
  3. Customize Options – At Your Fingertips. Some of you are going to want more – no standard cookie-cutter mobile site for you! If you fall into this group, you are going to love the easy template options and ability to customize your mobile site navigation and more. Don’t like what you see on your phone after you customize? Just go right back in and click another template – it’s that easy!
  4. As always, our Faithwebsites support team will be here to help you through the setup and any questions you have.

 

This product is scheduled for release in May 2012, and is available only for existing Faithwebsites and DIS customers. There will be a one-time setup fee and a small monthly service fee. Please start a new support ticket or contact support if you would like more information.

Posted on April 3rd, 2012

What are clients saying about Faithwebsites?

by lisag

We conducted a recent survey of our Faithwebsites clients, and got the following results. We love our customers, and it looks like you love us!! Thank you to everyone who participated in the survey!

  • Customer Service:   100%
  • Billing:  99.5%
  • Functionality:  98.2%
  • Website Design: 93.2%
  • Over-All: 100%
Note: this data is representative of our clients as a whole. The number of clients that took this survey was 25% higher than the industry standard. The survey was conducted in early 2012.
Posted on March 7th, 2012

AuctionTrak – New Version Released!

by lisag

We are excited to announce our new version of AuctionTrak is complete! AuctionTrak is an auction management program that allows you to manage your entire auction process. Ideal for schools, churches, ministries and nonprofits – any organization that conducts auctions at any scale.

AuctionTrak is an auction management program / auction software that allows you to:

  • Organize the donation solicitation process
  • Manage registrations for attendees
  • Prepare bid sheets, donation certificates, your auction catalog and many other pre-auction reports
  • Post your live and silent auction winning bids
  • Print final statements and post payments from bidders
  • Generate receipts, thank you letters and other post-auction reports

With AuctionTrak, you can manage your entire auction with ONE application!

Ready to see it for yourself? Watch our demo online. For more information,  contact sales@faithwebsites.com.

Posted on February 21st, 2012

New Enhancement: Image Cropping Tool!

by admin

We are super excited to announce that a new image cropping tool has been installed in Faithwebsites CMS!

Understanding the importance that top-quality visuals and slide shows have in websites today, this built-in crop tool will help you upload any picture and make that picture fit the designated space perfectly. This results in the image looking made for the space and professional, versus stretched or squished to fit the space!

The crop tool works with the Slide Show tool in the Main Body and Right Side Bar sections of the site.  The photo dimensions are drawn from the dimensions you have setup in the Slide Show tool.

Here’s a basic step-by-step of how the crop tool works. If you use a crop tool in other applications, you’ll find this quite familiar.

  1. When you add a photo in the Slide Show tool, you’ll see a Crop or Downsize option. Be sure that the button for crop photo is selected. Add your photo as you would normally.
  2. In the next step, click anywhere on the photo to get the crop tool to appear. In our example, this is the original photo we started with.
  3. Use the corners to resize the crop tool or grab the tool frame to reposition the tool.
  4. The crop box itself will always stay in the correct aspect ratio, (horizontal x vertical) of the dimensions in your Slide Show tool. What you see inside the crop box dotted lines is the final photo product that will be displayed. This allows you to take pictures and create copy space, added visual interest, cut out unwanted parts of the photo and the list goes on!
  5. Finally, click Crop Photo & Finish. The final result of our cropping example is below. We’ve made a wider horizontal photo fit a square Slide Show nicely by cropping out part of the photo and centering the focus on the subject.

Need more help? We have a video tutorial that will take you through the Slide Show Tool setup and cropping features. Still need more help? No problem, just contact Support. We’re happy to assist.

Posted on November 13th, 2011

Promoting your church’s Christmas service

by Faithwebsites Team

Whether your church does a large scale, multi-time Christmas service, or a single Christmas Eve service, Christmas is a time to reach out and invite others in the community to your church. Here are some suggestions on how you can use your website and social media to reach out to your community.

Week 1 and 2:

  1. Build a page on your website for the event. Be sure to give your page a simple filename – you’ll want a short URL for that specific page.
  2. Once your website page is ready, build an event on your Facebook page. Use the same graphics, same text as you do for your website page. You don’t have to build all the details in your Facebook event page – but be sure to include the key items (dates, times, locations, etc.) and a link directly to your website page for the Christmas service(s).
  3. Tweet the event on your church’s Twitter account.
  4. Recruit your congregation! Get the word out through your church bulletin, announcements and more, asking members to share the event on their personal Facebook pages and tweet about the event.
  5. Sit down with your Christmas service team and make a list of specific things you can use to continue to promote the service. You can use random thoughts & rem inders

    such as “the stage is being painted…”, “sneak peek” concept, “you don’t want to miss…” teasers and more. Keep it simple, keep it short and most of all, make sure you have enough ideas to tweet and post about, every day to every third day at a minimum.

Week 2 and 3:

  1. Put a schedule together or jot down reminders in your calendar for regular posts and tweets on the event.
  2. Take pictures of the set being built, the children or choir practicing – anything like that. Add a photo slideshow or gallery tool to the bottom of your Christmas event webpage, and upload those pictures there.
  3. From the step above, choose one of the pictures you’ve taken and post it to your Facebook wall and tweet it. Why one? You’ll get more mileage by posting one at a time directly to your Facebook wall, versus building a Facebook album. Albums are for your members – and, aha! You have that on your website page.
  4. Consider putting together a promo video and uploading on your website. Embed the video on your event page and be sure to update your Facebook wall and Twitter feed with the video’s link.
  5. Remind your congregation to keep promoting the event on their personal social media streams.
  6. Don’t forget to keep posting about the event – several times a week.

Week 4:

  1. Post a reminder on FB about having your members invite their contacts to the service. They can do this with just a couple clicks on Facebook!
  2. Keep it up! Post a new picture on your Facebook wall.
  3. Retweet, re-post daily.

The above is a basic plan starting about 4 weeks ahead; customize this to fit your schedule and your social media streams, but do plan ahead and start as early as you can, picking up the pace as you get closer to the event.

One important step – take notes along the way – what works and doesn’t work, the schedule, etc. You’ll want to brush those notes off in a short time for your Easter service!

Posted on November 8th, 2011

Share the Christmas Story…

by lisag

… and build up your social media following all in one. Have you heard of Natwivity?

The team at Faithwebsites was introduced to Natwivity last year.

Brilliantly produced and executed from a creative organization out of the U.K., the mission of Natwivity is to tell the story

of Christ’s birth – for the 21st century audience. Last year, all the characters of the greatest story on earth tweeted (Twitter) daily as they went through their lives. Joseph, Mary, Herod, and many were all sharing.

Natwivity targets the teen through 30′s audience, many of whom do not hear or get an opportunity to see the Christmas story. This target audience also represents the largest group of social media users, but Natwivity was loved by all. Grandparents chuckled over the thoughts of the Roman soldiers and shed tears over what may have been Mary’s prayers, while younger children were beginning to realize that these characters in the bible were real people.

Natwivity provides you with all the resources you need to join in that telling through your Facebook and Twitter streams. They even provide you with website ready images to promote the story. Just follow Natwivity on Facebook and/or Twitter and repost and share the story. Yes, it will require someone on your team to be dedicated to update your posts, but the updates take seconds and the results will be worth it.

Not only will you be sharing the Christmas story in a new way, you’ll be reaching a new audience, and you’ll gain momentum in building your social media network.

What are you waiting for? Natwivity starts in a couple weeks… check it out!

Note: While many Faithwebsites customers appreciated Natwivity last year, we encourage you to do your own research to ensure that your church or organization embraces the beliefs and presentation style of Natwivity.

Posted on November 4th, 2011

SEO… One powerful thing you can do today

by lisag

The Page Level Title Tag is one of the most important tags in your website – especially for all your key landing pages or your main navigation category pages. The content of the title tag is displayed by most search engines as the title of your page within the search engine results – or SERPs.  Search engines weigh the content in this title as extremely important or valuable insight as to what is contained on your web page  – resulting in a heavy impact on your overall SEO.

In Faithwebsites CMS, you can easily create your own Page Titles on a page by page basis, customizing the keywords for each of your landing pages. To do so, head to your navigation builder, and click “update” for the page you wish to edit.

Click on Advance Settings and you will see a field called “Title Bar Override”. Add your content there, and after saving and refreshing – you can see the changes in your browsers title bar field.

It takes a few weeks for search engines to update this content, but with the right keywords, but results can be seen quickly. Here are a few suggestions in creating your Page Title:

  • Try to keep your Title Tags to between 40 and 60 characters in length, including spaces.

    Less is more!

  • The Title Tag needs to make sense

    to people, not just to search engines. Remember that this is what is displayed on the page of search results for users – make it something that compels users to click on the link.

  • Focus on working in your most important keywords
  • Start with your key landing pages or your main (top) navigation pages first. See how that goes and work into other pages on your site.
  • Revisit! Create your page titles and then mark your calendar to review your analytics in a couple months – see which pages have increased and what the title tag says. Edit and repeat.
Posted on November 2nd, 2011

Introducing our all new Premium Designs

by lisag

The team has been super busy here building brand- new designs<

/a> – offering the best and latest in web design, with all the functionality and ease of Faithwebsites CMS.

We didn’t just create great website designs – we also did research on hundreds of churches, Christian schools and nonprofit organizations to determine what the latest trends were, and the needs that are unique to Christian organizations. Many churches need to have a home page that balances the needs of their regular attenders – getting info out to them fast – along with being seeker friendly or sensitive.

Nonprofits need a way to display compelling stories  – through slide shows that lead users to want to learn more.

All that and more can be found on the new designs. And you still get all the tools and benefits of Faithwebsites CMS!

If you are a current customer, we can install a Premium Design around your existing website content – very little w ork will be required from you

or your team! Plus, as an added bonus right now, current customers can “Like Us” on Facebook and post something on our wall (ie. Your favorite new Premium design, or your favorite FWS tool, or just comment on one of our posts – and receive special discounted pricing on design services and site upgrades! So, head to our Facebook page – be sure to tell us your organization name – and we’ll be in contact with you!

Posted on August 23rd, 2011

Back to Sunday School Freebie

by Faithwebsites Team

Kids are heading back to school, and for many churches, the fall season means the start-up of Sunday School.

Faithwebsites has produced a simple graphic for our customers to use on their websites. Ideal for home page, you can download any (or all!) of the images you think will work best for your site. Feel free to resize, and add your own copy.

Remember that if you use the slide show tool, or the Image tool in the text editor, you can have these images “click-able” to a page where your Sunday School information is located.

To download, click on the image – a full size version will open in your browser. Next, right click on the image and click “Save Image As”. (Remember to check out these free resources to edit your images: Picnik, Picasa, and Aviary.  Blessings from your Faithwebsites Team!