 Coming to divine design, tips and tools for building church websites. My name's Melanie Adcock and I've been building church websites since the 90s. It was my very first one using I think Adobe Go Live from the church. I was actually attending the time. We became or we became Adcock creative. My husband and I back in 2010, when we were both laid off from the church, we were working at. We were working in a large church in Mobile, Alabama. He was the graphic designer. I was the IT slash web person and we got called into the office. We saw the writing on the wall. The church was struggling. We knew that, you know, it was a matter of time before one of us were let go. It was a little pastor heavy. They had salary, they had, they had just finished a big, huge building campaign and then the economy tanked and they were struggling. So I kept saying, you know, well, when they ask us which one has to go, please, you know, I'll volunteer. And so we both got called in and we're told that, you know, that Friday was going to be our last day that they could no longer afford to have us on staff. Well, that was kind of a shock. But like I said, we saw the writing on the wall. We had done Dave Ramsey's financial piece university. So we had six months of salary in the bank. We had our $1,000 emergency fund. We had everything paid off except one car and our house. We had no credit card debt. So we were in the absolute perfect position to start our own business. Now, our first client was the church that laid us off because, believe it or not, they thought we were going to still do our work but do it for free. And I was like, no, but I'll do your website for $1,000 a month because I didn't want to do it anymore. And they had no option because it was built in Dreamweaver and nobody there could do it. So they were actually a client of mine for about five more years. I had switched them over to WordPress at the time but they were so staff poor because they basically, if anybody left, they didn't replace them. So they were running a huge church on a skeleton staff. Our second client was the church I used to work at. Again, like that at that time, $1,500 a month to rebuild their website. They were on a church website platform that they couldn't change and they couldn't even update their website. So I rebuilt their website in WordPress and they were my client until 2021 when I actually fired them. And then my third client was a church that the music pastor I worked with at the church that laid me off went to that church to become the admin pastor and they hired both my husband and me to work for them. So within the first year we had made up our salary that we were making at the church and we were comfortable. We knew that we had three months of severance, we had six months. So we gave ourselves a year to see if we can make it as our own agency. And we haven't looked back from there. Now we get to, instead of serving one church, we get to serve many. And a lot of people say I don't want to do churches. I can't make any money doing churches. You know, yes you can, especially in the south. I mean there's like a church on every other corner. And there's a gazillion different denominations. So I'm going to show you some tips, tricks, tools and a way to think about how you can sell to churches. Because it's not just websites that you can sell. There's other services that you can sell. For instance, my church, we do everything. We do their social media. We do their email marketing. We do their web, simply because the smaller the church, the less people there are to do that job. We actually have a huge church up in Rochester, New York. And they just don't want to, they want to know that there's going to be somebody that's reliable to do the work. And in fact, I keep telling them you're overpaying me for what I'm doing. You either need to give me more work or we need to, because I feel guilty about how much they're paying me, but I keep asking them to give me work. So let's kind of go over what we're going to go over today. And some of them I'm just going to touch on and others. I'll spend a little bit more time on the tools for building websites. What theme you should use? How should you handle sermons, sermon notes, small groups, prayer requests, giving, church management, integrations, streaming services, because that became very important about three years ago. And podcasts, the tips. Where should you store those files? Should you use YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, Rumble? Email marketing, homepage layout, bulletins, or not to do bulletins. Are you going to do it all digital? Another thing you can sell. Sermon notes, event registration, event registration payments, resources, and then other services, weekly updates to the website. Are you going to be promoting events? Sermons, bulletins, emails, sermon art. We have church clients. We do their website. But they've bought a subscription for us to design their sermon series artwork, same with event artwork. And we do one-off artwork for them as well. How should you layout your homepage? And paper bulletin, we do paper bulletin layouts for my husband's the graphic designer. He does that for a few churches versus digital. We do that for a few churches. And building a church app with WordPress, because it's a status fimble for pastors to have their app. They don't need one really, but they want one. OK, let's talk about tools. Themes, church themes, should you use one? Absolutely not. Do not use a church theme. They are filled with all the stuff that you don't need. You want to separate function from design. Your theme is your design. That's your colors, your fonts. That's the candy wrapper. The content is the candy bar. Keep those two separate. So because if you use a church theme, you better love it because it's an ugly, ugly divorce. You talk about things like theme for us. Theme for us. Or any church, if you Google church themes, you're going to get church themes. Things that combine sermons, events, and all the staff. Because moving that stuff out of that theme is not easy. And it's ugly. So you want to separate the functionality and the layout. And that's what you want to just want a nice, clean, great coded theme. And the other thing is square peg round hole. Would you classify the church starter theme from cadence in that same category? I'll talk about that in a minute. The square peg, you get this beautiful website built with this church theme. And then the church comes back to you. We really like it to do this instead. Well, now you're customizing somebody else's stuff. And it's just a cascade of problems. Believe me, you're learning from my mistakes. And then theme conflicts, not usually the best coded themes. If you're getting something that's so niche specific, choose a clean, well-supported theme and use a page builder or the block editor to build out what the design that you need. Cadence, cadence starter sites, great. A great starting point. And I'm gonna talk about how you can use that as a website, as a service. I use Cadence now. I use Cadence, the premium version, Cadence Pro. I did use AstroPro about half my sites that I'm managing now are still on Astro. Generate Press is another great one. If I had to choose only three right now, those would be my three. In that order. I like Generate Press because it's loaded with hooks and filters. So if I have to do something that's really highly advanced with a lot of hooks and filters, I'll probably use Generate Press. Use plugins specific for the purpose that you need. Like there's a church admin plugin that has all kinds of stuff in it, events, sermons and all that. I'd put that right up there with a church theme. You want each piece of function to be separate. That makes it easier to troubleshoot. You're not having all these things tied together. You can create your own custom post types. Pretty easy with Metabox, Pods or just code, CPTUI, and then use Advanced Custom Fields to get things exactly what you want. Event plugins, I have a whole thing on event plugins for churches, but the events calendar, which I'm currently at war with because of their latest update, I've kind of gone over to modern events calendar. It has fifth, the last time I counted was 58 layouts in the free version. So you could pretty much find what you want. And their support's pretty good. It's a lot better than the events calendar right now. Groups plugins, how are you gonna handle the groups at the church, the Bible studies, the discipleship groups? How are you gonna do taking prayer requests? Is it gonna be a simple form or are you gonna have an interactive system? Giving, most churches have some type of church management software. You can do like a giving form directly to Stripe, and then they can get the stuff from Stripe and put it into their giving records and give out. But generally, most churches use some type of church management software, so you have like a link to it or a form embed. I don't like the form embeds because they're usually not that mobile. I'd rather link off the website to it simply because it makes a little bit better user experience. Okay, let's talk about sermon systems because that's become a really big deal in the last three years. You want something that's easy to set up and easy to use. If you're not the person that put in the weekly information in there, it should be a fill in the blank. Do they do series? Do they like six weeks, nine weeks? I had one of my, the last church I worked at, he had a series that lasted a year. That was like, oh, I'm so tired of this series. Do they use YouTube or Vimeo? You never upload video to your website. You want it to be able to share social, have social media sharing built in. Sermon notes, there's a place to put in sermon notes or upload other PDFs. Check the mobile view because, just because it looks great on desktop, sometimes you need to tweak the mobile view. Does it automatically reference the Bible verse? A few years ago, none of them had that really, but now almost all of them do. Do they have a search and filter? Can you search by speaker? Can you search by the books of the Bible? Can you search by topic? Of course, that only works if they actually give you topics to put in for that. Does it have a built-in podcast feed, or do you have to use a third-party plug-in, like PowerPress, to put the audio file in to generate the XML file for the podcast feed? Because those pastors, just like they want an app, they want their sermons on iTunes. Okay, this is Series Engine. This is a screenshot of Series Engine. Series Engine, I've been using for years. It's built on PHP. It does kind of have, it wasn't built the WordPress way. I'm gonna say that up front. Originally it was not built the WordPress way. You can turn on a custom post type that will generate the WordPress custom post type. And then you can use a page builder or the block editor to kind of style that. I don't do that, I just use what's built in. It doesn't come up in WordPress search. So somebody was searching for kept in perfect piece or the, it would not come up in the WordPress search because it's not a custom post type out of the box. Now, if you check the box and it creates one, then it would come up. You don't have to display it on the front end, but it would at least come up in the search. That was his way of getting around it. There's another one called advanced sermons, which is pretty good. I'm actually seriously looking at that for my smaller websites because it's basically what we think of as posts. But it just has the fields for like the title, the books of the Bible, things like that. There's easy sermon hub, WordPress sermon manager. You can build your own custom type, post type to make it look exactly what you want. If you're using subsplash, that church is using subsplash app, which is very popular. You can actually embed the sermons from, they have an embed code. So it saves a step. So they're not having to put it in the website and then put it in the app or they get it from the app and they put it in the website. So it's just an embed code. There's a bunch of them out there. There's some really, really like sermon browser that's like a hundred years old. I used it for like a day and it was like, okay, it was built in tables at the time. And I'm like, yeah, that's not for me. So, but of the two best right now at this point is our series engine and advanced sermons. Now sermon notes. Most people don't know this. That little free Bible app that most people have, there's bible.com forward slash events. You can put your sermon notes on there. It's kind of a rudimentary system. It's not, it's got some glitches to it, but you can do a fill in the blank sermon notes on there. And you put the location of the church in there. I'm like, I do this for several churches. So I have a whole bunch of them set up. And then when the person's in the pew and they open up the app, if they go to events, it uses geolocation and shows all the churches that have sermon notes online right there. So they can pick that and do fill in the blanks. Faith notes, which is interactive sermon notes.com, gives you the same thing. It's a, you can, there's a paid free level paid service and then a custom service. The free, they don't save your notes only except for like a month. But it's, you can upload the Word document and it creates all the spaces. It creates the fill in the blanks. So it's a big time saver. I like the way it looks a little bit better. You could always go through the hassle of creating a fillable PDF. Yeah, even I don't do that. You could do a form plugin. There was one called WP notes. And I don't think it supported anymore that did the same thing where you could, they could email it to themselves and all that. And I actually did a talk at the beginning of the pandemic on three race to utilize online sermon notes and there's the link to that. Ways you can sell it to your clients. So small groups. Now, Sunday school, Bible study, discipleships, life groups, growth groups, small groups, connection groups, whatever they're calling it today. If you're a Baptist, you know, they change the name all the time. Whatever the flavor of the month is. So how do you display that? It could be a simple table. It can be a simple list. You could create a custom post type. There's a thing on here called groups engine written by the guy who did series engine, which gives you, I'll show you an example of that. Let me go ahead and escape here. Let's see, there we go. This is groups engine, which allows you to put in the name of the group, the day it meets, the time it works great if you're doing a church that has home based groups, because you can put the home address in, but it won't show it on the front end of the website, but it does an area. For instance, like I did Warren Baptist and they had some groups that met across the river in South Carolina. They had some that met in Grove town. They had some meeting in different areas and it just gave the general area. So it allowed the people with home groups to be able to search one that was near them. This church just basically has everything at the church, but it gives you an age. What's the age for this? What's the location on the campus and it allows you to do a search based on that topic. The bigger the church, the better this is because it allows you to search and then again it has a view as a map feature. I don't think I have that connected because everything's at the church on this particular church. So let me go, I hate being hard of seeing. So let's go back here. Like I said, some church management systems actually have an embed to find a group. It depends, more and more of the recent build church management systems are becoming like planning center, breeze and stuff. They have things that you can bed on your website. And it looks halfway decent and it makes it searchable and people can actually join and it goes right into the church management system because most church management systems, especially the old ones are closed systems. You can't really interact with them and that's to protect data. But there are a few exceptions that allow some work. Okay, prayer requests, simple form. 90% of the time I use a simple form. Prayer engine, again sound familiar, groups engine, series and prayer engine is an interactive system where people can make prayer requests and it comes to the moderator. In my church, for instance, that's me. Now, I'll warn you, the serial prayer requesters from all over the world. I've gotten to point with some of them, I've blocked their IP address or I use clean talk and put their email address in to block them so I don't see them anymore because they just keep doing it over and over and over again and it's usually witchcraft, this, that, it's weird. I get some really weird ones on there. But what it has is I prayed for this button. So when somebody prays for it, it sends the original poster a little email that says somebody's prayed for your request which is a nice touch. You can connect it to a Twitter thing so if you have a prayer team and you can create a Twitter account for that, they get notified. So it's a really neat system and I haven't used it to its full potential mostly because there's usually not somebody on staff that wants to handle that or the person that's on staff that's handling the prayer is a little old lady who's just not technically savvy and that's just beyond them and I really don't want all those emails coming to me. WP Prayer 2 is a newer version of, obviously WP Prayer and it's in the repository, kind of does some nuclear, Nucleus Launcher, Nucleus is a website platform system built by Brady Shearer. He's a YouTuber, does a lot of church stuff. It's a little pop-up, you can put it on your WordPress website, a little pop-up and it manages that but once you get into his system, all he's trying to tell you is to build your website on Nucleus. They all look exactly the same and there's really no way to customize it but and then giving, again, church management system embed, link to it. The problem with using a giving form and Stripe is if they're gonna use it for something else, a church must keep giving separated from event registration because they're going to something and they're basically getting something in their thing. You don't want them to get in trouble with the IRS so I get people, well I'm gonna use my giving, our giving platform to do event registration. No, you're not and this is why. So I have one church, well we're just gonna, I'll just create a thing on our online giving and they can pay for this event. No, you don't do that. It has to be a separate system. So I get them to sign up for a Stripe account. They do event, we do gravity forms, event registration. That goes there and I train the account lady how to pull all that stuff down and put it into their system. So those two things are kept separate. You can always use giveWP. The nice thing about that is it gives you donor records. So if they're not using a church management software, it gives them a chance to do that. Tively, LifeWay Donate. My church is actually using that one. I did not pick it. It's kind of glitchy on the event registration but they keep it separate because they actually have both things on there. Push Pay, again. But that can get very, very pricey. They, it's one of those things where they lead you in the door with a lower price and then the renewal fees gives you a heart attack. And then online giving, that's onlinegiving.com. It's great for big churches because it's very customizable and they will build you an app. ACH, Vanco, those are all ones. You do not want to do anything that requires PCI compliance. So authorize.net. Oh, we want it to go directly into our bank account. And I'm like, you're gonna use Stripe. It's gonna go directly in your bank account and you do not have to worry about PCI compliance. I have one church that uses Vanco. We link to their form but every quarter we still have to do the PCI compliance even though we're not integrating with the website. And I just have their log in because the lady has no idea how to answer the questions. So, but you have Vanco, that's one of those issues or ACH. So use the right tool for the job. Okay, events calendar. Events calendar pro. They just reinstated the freed and nonprofits. You have to do all the paperwork but they don't charge you anymore. Still, I do not like their new version six. It's like hello, 2010. There's no styling whatsoever. And compared to modern events calendar, which, oh, I have 58 style. Well, I have the pro version. I found it early and they had this AppSumo deal. And so I bought a bunch of licenses. And so I still have plenty of them left but beautiful, beautiful layouts. Now, I will say if you're going to be selling tickets and this is not even just church websites, anything. If you're gonna be selling tickets, right now the events calendar plus events tickets, still the best checkout flow for the user. The booking system that modern events calendar has is awful. I mean, you can get through it, but it's very confusing. And I can like, what the heck? It's just, we used it for room reservations during the pandemic first thing. And I'm like, this is the most crazy flow. It didn't make any sense. So I've actually gave, did screenshots, wrote out this. And I said, this makes sense because this is what people are used to. This is what you're doing. You need to fix this and send it to them. Event registration payments, I just mentioned that. I put that on that remind me. Giving is separate from event registration. We actually tagged the things going to Stripe as event registration. So it's easy for the people that are doing the accounting to make sure. And I put that again. Do not use donation forms for event registrations. Events, now, what should you put on the event calendar? There's some churches that want every meeting, everything in there. There's churches that just do what we call the A and B events, the big, the big events. My church, we kind of do a combination of both. I put in like the committee meetings and our main events. But, and the Bible studies that meet during the week. But I don't put in every little, like I don't do the missions team meeting. I don't do the little tiny meetings, the properties committee meeting. I like to do deacons, the ones where everybody wants to look up and see where the room number is. Most church giving systems don't have the event option, but I put on there, there's different ones. Lifeway, Breezy and PushPay all have event registrations built in. Community church builder, again, another one that has event registrations built in. Again, form plugin and Stripe. I say Stripe over PayPal because PayPal has just gone off the deep end on something. So, and it just makes it great. They never leave the website. That's the nice thing about Stripe. Eventbrite, if it's a free event, there's no charge on Eventbrite. So you can use it. Same with TicketTaylor. I use TicketTaylor during the pandemic for when a church was limiting the number of people that could come in person. So we actually had tickets for the service. And again, it's free if it's not a paid event. Now they use Stripe and they just charge a little fee on top of it. So it's another way to do it. And they have a check-in app. So if you're doing check-in, that's another option. I did a whole thing on the event calendar a couple years ago and that's the link to it. You can get the slides. Everything's at the end and linked so you don't have to worry about that. Okay, church management software. Because believe it or not, you're considered an internet expert and a church expert when the church works for you. I've done things is, I've negotiated copier contracts for churches because I find out what they're paying. I'm like, you're getting ripped off. You know, you should be paying X, you can get this for three cents a click for tabloid each side. And you're paying 15 cents to print the bullet? No, I know. And so I just bring it in and I'm like, okay, this is what we're willing to pay, can you do it? And well, okay, we'll just go to the next person because I know I can get this because I've got it for somebody else. Church management software, does people really well or they do money really well? There's not one out there that does both well. So when they ask me for suggestions, I said, well, do you want it to do people really well? Do you want it to do money really well? I would say use two different things. Use a web-based giving platform that does that and does it very well and then use a church management that does people. Most of them will talk to each other if they're the key players in the field. Most church management soft ones do not automatically integrate with websites because that's a security wish. You have all that information. That's another reason to keep the financials separate because then if somebody gets into that system, they have all that information. So pretty much like ACS and they do very rudimentary integration. Shelby, very rudimentary integration. And most of the time you don't want that stuff on your website because it's so hideously looking that it just looks awful. You should not have any church member data on your website, period. That's it because that information is protected by the weakest password of your users and you know your users are gonna reuse every password. Once they get in there, then they have access to everything. Okay, does it have a form system that integrates that you can just plop it in there and people can put it in it goes automatically into that prospect and that whole marketing of the church. Same thing, some of them like Breeze and Planning Center and stuff have embed forms. So you can work and here's a list of a whole bunch of them. Okay, Shelby, that's an oldie, oldie, oldie. Shelby does financials really well, sucks at people. Okay, and their new version is arena. Every church I know that went to arena went back to the old version five of Shelby. Shelby's kind of a pig and arena's the lipstick on the pig. So ACS the same thing, they couldn't fix their ugly system so they built a new system called Realm. Fellowship One, been around about 15 years, a little bit better but it's again, it's a better for the internal management of especially big churches because which pastor's in charge to handle this visitor and it kind of has this whole process that does Automated Accountability. Planning Center, very nice option for churches of all sizes. Church Community Builder, Astrick, it has a WordPress plugin. Does people really well, doesn't do financials so you have to have a separate financial system. Rock CMS is a free software. It kind of does everything they offer web and people and financials but it's one of those where you get the software for free but you have to set up your own server or you use their hosted system and then you have kind of buy into the whole thing. A nice thing about it and they asked just kind of for a donation on that and it's churches so they're not gonna pay anything that they can get for free. So Breeze, I have a few churches using that and the nice thing about it is I can link to their event registrations. I use Modern Events Calendar, it has a field for more information, I just put the link and put the buttoning as register online goes to their system. Ministry Platform, I worked on this one. It's for big multi-campus churches. Think Ministry is their overall thing but Ministry Platform, the church that I work with had 13 campuses at the time and so we set this whole thing up, group management. It was the most awful horrendous thing I've ever had to work on. It was built by a database geek and so it actually took, you had to go in three separate places just to set up an event. You had to set up the product then you had to do this and you couldn't do it all in one place. You had to do it backwards and it was such a pain and I just hated, hated working in it but I trained on it because it was gonna be integrating with kind of, with the website and the guy over finance went to it. Well he left, that left me as the expert on Ministry Platform. Well they used onlinegiving.com for their giving and those guys figured out how to take all the data out of Ministry Platform and make it look really good because when you buy an account with them you get a free app. Well we were able to take their app code and embed it into the website and make it look really good because their stuff didn't look good and we used their app feed to actually put the information on the website. So because it, I mean it's a big, big system so if you have a multi-campus church, chances of them using something like that, church track is another one, a little for smaller churches, touch point another one. Now if you Google church management software you're gonna get pages and pages and pages. Five years ago there was a short list. Because of the pandemic there's a lot of them now. So if you can, if you kind of get your head around all the stuff that's out there, when you go and talk to a church, you're speaking what they, you know, well you can ask, hey do you use Shelby? Do you use ACH? Do you use, what do you use? Oh yeah, I've heard of that. Most people if they go to an agency and they say, they have no idea what they're talking about. So you have a leg up on the competition. Okay, live streaming, that became very, very important. About three years ago. But you get what you pay for with a streaming service. There's all different price points out there. Right now the best bang for your buck is livestreaming.com, which is Vimeo. Six, I think it's $69 a month, but you have to pay for the whole year. The nice thing about it is once they use OBS software, if you aren't familiar with that, that's kind of splits the feed coming out of the cameras. You can split it and go to Facebook, you can go to YouTube, but you can go right to here. But once the service is over, it's already on Vimeo. So it kills two birds with one stone. Now my church, and they were paying, like we were using Stream Monkey. And it was, they raised the price at like halfway through the pandemic. And I mean it was like $225 a month. And I'm like, we can do better. So I went out and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is, I have one church using this and I didn't know how much I was gonna look at it. This is gonna be perfect. Took us 15 minutes to set it up because we already were using OBS and all that. And it makes it affordable for small churches to stream. And if they use that, then it's not stuck on Facebook for Facebook to take down and you don't have it anymore. Because if you have that music licensing thing. So if you're broadcasting the whole service and you're doing, and they're singing more contemporary music, the chances of that video being taken down by Facebook are great. So own your stuff. Have control of your video. Have control of your audio. Because those churches, you need to own your content. Even small churches now can stream. I don't care if it's iPad on a tripod, you can stream. So they don't need a big expensive camera. And a church online platform. Church online platform is a free service that allows you to put your streaming in bed. We take our streaming in bed from Vimeo when we put it in there and we schedule all our Sunday services. And it goes right to there. Now they have a place where they can do prayer requests. They can link to give online, they can want, and they can chat to other people before and after the service. So it's a skin that you put. And you can do a custom domain like live.fbcnunin.org versus church online platform forward slash fbcnunin. So we just did a custom domain live. And we use that. And we use the same embed for everything we do. So if it's a women's event, it's a, we have one embed code. And we just use it for everything. So we don't have to go in and set up events all the time. It's a great thing. So if you're thinking about using that and you're not sure how, you know, reach out to me and I'll give you a demo. Own your own, I said this before, own your audio and video. Don't depend on a third-party service to have that. If they use a third-party service like SoundCloud or Lisbon for podcasts, have a backup because what are you gonna do if you don't wanna pay that fee anymore? There's a great equipment list by Brady Shear on his YouTube channel on what you need to podcast, what you need, he has different budget levels. And, you know, you get on his email list, he does have some great social media stuff, but, you know, all in all, he's ended up selling something but you have to, you know, take that with a grain of salt but he does have a great resource and a great YouTube channel. Okay, podcast, again, Series Engine, it's built in. PowerPress by Blueberry. Excellent because it allows you to create different feeds so you can have a podcast feed for Sunday, you can have a podcast feed for Wednesday, or you can choose to put them all in the same one. You can have a podcast feed for women events, if it's a big church, for men's events, for college, for students. Warren Baptist had one for everything under the sun. So, it allows you to submit to Apple and you can do third-party servers like Lisbon, SoundCloud and stuff like that again, keep a copy because otherwise once you stop paying them, all your stuff goes away and you don't have it anymore. Subsplash, again, audio and video if you're doing an app but once you put it up there and explain to your clients, there's a difference between an audio podcast and a video podcast. If it's a video, according to Apple standards, it has to have chapter markers and all this other stuff. Now, Subsplash will do that for you for a fee. They'll take your video, they'll do the chapter markers and all that stuff. Again, you're paying a huge monthly fee for that. So, we just do audio podcasts and then we have, for my church, we record the whole service with Livestream.com and it's automatically on there. But Series Engine allows you to put two videos on. So, we put the sermon as the main video and then we put the whole service as what we call worship as the second video. So, the user gets to choose what they listen to. That's one of another benefit of the Series Engine. Okay, let's talk tips. How am I doing? Okay, again, own your content. We kind of turned into a cancel culture here. So, you've got to think about the third party system that you're using. And because of the whole music thing and church licensing, now my church, whenever we post anything, it has music in it, we put our license on there. And so far, we haven't been taken down, okay? Amazon S3, excellent for audio storage or any backups because it's the cheapest, not the easiest for the client to use. Dropbox, Google Drive, not on somebody's computer that they're not backing up. Again, backups, Amazon 3 with versioning. So, if you get somebody in there who's mad and they're leaving the church, they don't delete all your audio files. So, you can go back and restore them. Zapier to automate things, I did a zap. So, when one church uploads their audio file for thing, it creates a task on my Trello board and gives me the link. So, I don't have to log in to get it. Again, do not upload audio or video files to your website. I actually block it on all my sites I build. You cannot upload audio or video on sites I build because I don't want to have to back that stuff up. Again, Facebook versus YouTube versus Vimeo versus Wistia. Wistia isn't a paid service, kind of like Vimeo. It's a little pricey, so none of my churches use it. But they either use YouTube or Vimeo. I like Vimeo because you don't get ads at the, and you don't get recommended videos that are, or could be offensive to church members. So, I get to control what it looks like. You can take all the branding off, all that. And then, here's other things you can sell. Email marketing, Mailchip, Active Campaign, ConvertKit, Send in the Blue. Text in Church is kind of an SMS service and an emailing service. Planning Center, again. Weekly email update. I do a first five, the five top things coming up at our church. That goes out on Wednesday. I do a digital bulletin that goes out on Friday. Combine with SMS. Now, I would not sign my church up with SMS because I knew that would be something they would abuse. Especially the music department, so no. But Text in Church, here's a tip. If you go to Text in Church and you sign up for a webinar, you'll get a 45% off coupon. So watch the webinar, and you'll get a coupon code and you won't pay full price. Apps, Subsplash, a lot of them. Push Pay, Roar App. Apppressor builds an app with WordPress. At my site, builds an app using WordPress. So you put the stuff on your website, it populates the app. If you're interested in that, contact me because I'm running out of time, but I'll show you how that's set up. The hardest part is deploying your app with Apple because you have to jump through all their hoops. Sell social media. We do that for our church. We just go in and we wanna handle it because we wanna control what things look like. And if we let them put stuff up that they've designed, then we have to go in and take it down and put up something better because sometimes it can be pretty rough looking. And so we wanna make sure that everything stays on brand. And then the homepage. Stop making it about the church. Make it about the visitor. Think building a story brand, Donald Miller. If you haven't read that book, read that book. That's how you should build a website. It needs to be all about the visitor and the front half. So okay, the bottom half has a little bit of stuff. What makes your church special? Where do they park? What do they wear? Show what people look like that are going to your church on Sunday. Give them an idea of what are they gonna, it's better be overdressed than underdressed. What kind of music do you have? Do they want contemporary? Do they want traditional? What about the kids? How easy it is to check in? What kind of security do you have for kids? That is very, very important. What kind, do you do background checks on everybody that comes in contact with anybody under the age of 18? You need to have that information on your website. And if you ask that question when you're interviewing that client for that job, it makes, what do you do? What's your security procedure? Okay, bulletins, I'm gonna go really fast here. Of course QR codes, it had drastic come back in the last three years. We use them a lot now. We actually put a QR code linked to the sermon notes in the bulletin so people can go and fill it out. And then here's things you can sell. Of course, website care plans, weekly updates. Don't be afraid to customize the plan on the base of your work. I have clients paying as little $99 a month. I have clients paying $1,000 a month, depending on how much I am doing for them. For some churches, I am their complete, I'm their webmaster. I even go to meetings. I have meetings with them. It's all part of the fee. And some of them, I only build forums. Others, I just put in events. So it all depends on the church. And I'm not afraid to do a custom plan. We do, like I said, we do custom sermon series art. We do a custom event art. We do weekly email designs. We make templates for them. I make templates for them on MailChimp. Just charge a one-off fee and then they use it. We do the online sermon notes. Again, text in church, Twilio's another texting platform. We sell privacy policies to them for term again. Social media management. And then website as a subscription. Well, this church is tiny, they don't have a budget. Then sell them your version of Squarespace. Use a template, use a cadence template or an Astro Pro template. Tell them, build the box, put them in the box, don't do anything outside the box. Charge them a setup fee, $500, $700, so you get a little bit of money up front. And then charge them a subscription fee that takes care of the hosting and the web-ups. Web updates and content updates. Again, build the box, give them two or three choices. Then you're getting them locked. And once a church, especially a small church, has a good working website, they're not gonna go out and shop for something else. They'll just keep paying you. And I'm starting to do more and more of the website of the service. And I'm talking tiny churches, like 20 people. I just sold one last week, 20 people. They're gonna pay $500 and then a monthly fee of $119. They don't have to do a thing except send an email to get their website updated. To the point, I even have default content based on their denomination. I took the time because I know, I speak church. I have one denomination. It's an African-American denomination based out of Baltimore called Church of the Living God International. They all use the same terminology. So I wrote the terminology and I just tweaked it from one of the first websites I built. And that's all they want. They don't want original content. They want it to be just like that one with their name on it. So they're not worried about, they just wanna have a website that works. So at this point, all we have to do is plug in their information and it's done. We can build a website in a couple days. So I talked about that. It's great for limited budgets. So you can, but you have to build that box. That's the important thing. You have to build that fence around the service you're providing. And I come up, this is not a custom website. This is what it's going to look like. This is what it's going to have. This is what it's not going to have. This is what it's not. We're not going to go in and customize each layout because the cheaper the thing, the more they ask. So you gotta make sure that when you do a church website as a service that what they see is what they get. That you're not gonna go in and customize every little thing and turn it into a custom website. So set your levels, set your boundaries. It includes everything. So, and then that's your monthly, because you want that monthly reoccurring revenue. That mailbox money that you live off of regardless whether or not you have design jobs. And you can do social media churches. Here's some great, again, you can get those slides. These are all links to all the different things I mentioned here. Even a church branding guide example. Very important because you have all the different ministries creating all their own stuff. Taping it to the wall with masking tape. And so I couldn't go through my church and I start pulling things down. They're taped with blue painter's tape and masking tape. Again, all these are links. Here's my contact information. You can get the slides at wpchurch.me forward slash tips and church questions. That's my church questionnaire that I asked churches. And then my contact information. And there's the link to the slides right there. So I have to go. We got five minutes real fast. We got five minutes. Kevin. Church bulletins. Hold on a second. Kevin, this is going for me. Sorry, church bulletins. Curious what you found works well. We right now in our church do an extensive bulletin which they would like to change. And maybe go to the three fold or something like that. Most of our churches use tri fold or they use two up on eight and a half by 11. And it's just like the top three things that are going on and the sermon notes on the back. So email me and I'll send you examples. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you very much. Can you take pictures of the people in the church? I know it's my church. It had basically people's bad side. Their faces and things were not shown. Hire a professional photographer or find somebody that can come and take the pictures because I get that all the time. You get the horizontal pictures or you get the vertical pictures for the horizontal and stuff. We actually said, look, let's just hire a photographer to come in at Easter where your church is full and take pictures. But you can take any trouble in the church? I don't take pictures of children. But we just have a thing on our sign that your picture may be taken. We have a disclaimer in our narthex. But if people come and say, take that down, we will. What we did recently is we hired a photographer and we just said, back left of the church, if you don't want a picture taken, sit there. And so they knew that Joe won't get taken pictures of everybody else. And I will not post pictures of children at the church unless I have a release from there. And if it has a name tag on it, I take it into Photoshop and blur it out. Quick question on kind of security and staff turnover, which is frequent. A lot of times you've got to volunteer staff doing updates and such. Recommendations on how to manage access to various items, particularly things like Facebook pages, which are tied to your personal profile, things like that when all of a sudden half of staff disappears and you don't know where any of the things are. Well, one person, like my church, my husband and I both are admins on the church, have more than one person as an admin on your Facebook page. That is very, very, very important. Even if you have to create a fake profile, I make them an admin as a backup. So, but I've had churches where they've gone in and deleted everybody, got mad at the church and they, you know, it took them a while to get their Facebook page back. You know, we've, I believe me, I've heard it all. I've had them where they've gone in and wiped out their AWS. Again, I had Virgining, so it was one-click restore. So... What if nobody knows that you've been hired in your own retainers? Well, I hold the keys to the kingdom. Yeah, I, and my church knows. My church, nobody has a login except my husband and me because honestly, but others, my smaller churches, we have multiple people. We never just have one. So, and there were usually, I'll get an email. I usually get an email before the person knows, so I know who's getting fired. Remove their access from the website. I'll explain later. And then I hear. So, I feel bad. I know before they do that they're not gonna have their job anymore. But thank you so much. If you have any questions, you can meet me out in the hallway. I have to get out of the next speaker's way. So...