Based on our previous microsite hosting option, we’ve created a brand new GCI microsite that is fully usable on creation. What does that mean? We use your church information from our online system to create a page that is pre-populated with general information that applies the most GCI churches in the United States. It uses
Category: Web sites
Website Hosting
One of the first questions on your mind when you set up a website is, “Where do I host it?” There are so many options to choose from. How do you make sense of it all. How do you even get started? Well, I can offer some recommendations, but honestly, it comes down to what
Online Giving
A question that comes up from time to time is, “How can we accept donations on our website?”. Well, the answer used to be pretty simple, but it’s gotten a bit more complicated this year as we are in the middle of rolling out a new online giving platform powered by GivingFuel. The new platform
GCI-branded WordPress Theme
Wow. I thought this blog was completely dead. And then I get a question from someone who actually came here. So here’s the question: “Is there a template for local church websites that takes advantage of the excellent branding GCI is achieving?” Well, yes, there is. But we’ve been struggling with various issues with it.
Why Encrypt Websites?
This year, GCI implemented https encryption across most of its hosted websites. Most of these websites are pretty basic with simple information about a church or camp. There’s nothing really private on them. There’s no personal information collected to keep secure. Still, I had my reasons for wanting it and recent developments by Let’s Encrypt made it
Why WordPress? And is it really safe?
Anyone who has in the past few years asked GCI to host a website for them knows that I push WordPress. And while we don’t force you to use any particular website hosting environment, there are good reasons why we recommend it even if it is more work for us. So here are some reasons:
Want Your Website To Get Hacked?
At least a few of you know that I push pretty hard when it comes to updating software that runs websites. I always refer back to the reason: old software is easier to hack. Today I ran across this article about a cybersecurity expert who got his website hacked. And why? Because he didn’t update
Websites: Search Engine Optimization
It’s been a while since I last wrote for this websites series, partly due to the lack of promotion on it, and partly due to other interruptions. But I’m back. Last time, we discussed evaluating how people will find your website, and gave some pointers on how to go about writing text to support that.
WordPress 3.1, Performance Changes & Stats
For those running on our WordPress-based easy web site service, we’re in the process of upgrading you all to WordPress 3.1. I’m also looking at your plugin list and replacing WP-SpamFree with WP-HashCash for performance reasons. And for those hosted on DreamHost (the majority of you), we’re upgrading to PHP 5.3 and adding the page
Websites: What You Say Matters
In the last article we started thinking about the web site’s mission, and just asked the question, “how will they find your website?” It’s not like I didn’t think about the purpose of the websites I previously worked on. I just thought it was rather obvious. We wanted it to be a resource for members