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 Q. What do you mean by Content Management System, or CMS?
A. The latest major development in web technologies came as companies discovered the benefits of maintaining an active, living website presence. In order to keep information dynamic and continue to draw an interested audience, it became sensible to develop easy ways for people with no programming know-how to take full control of their site. Because of the dynamic nature of church ministry, we believe no church website should be developed without a Content Management System.
Q. Are there different Content Management Systems available?
A. Yes. There are many. In fact, some sites are designed with a completely proprietary "back end" or CMS. Content Management can be very expensive to develop for a site, and a large portion of custom design fees are generally allocated to this area of development. At GenEvange we use an open source CMS called "Joomla" for all of our non-custom sites. Joomla is the most advanced open source CMS in the world, it is actively evolving which matches our Web Philosophy, and it is FREE. While we have significant development costs to thread our site designs onto the Joomla platform, using this open source tool saves our church clients literally tens of thousands of dollars per installation.
Q. If Joomla is free, why do we pay GenEvange?
A. The CMS is what controls a website behind the scenes, it is not the website. Our websites have been carefully designed specifically with churches in mind by the finest web developers in the country. It has taken some of the most advanced programming to get features customized strictly for churches integrated effectively onto the Joomla platform. We customize the Joomla platform to make it easily understandable for church settings, and then we continue to evolve the CMS as new technologies and versions are released by the Joomla development team.
Q. Are your site designs "templates"?
A. Yes and no. In essence all websites are templates or structural dirivitives of each other. We create a functional structure for each of our designs, but that design can be customized to such a high degree that it is not a template so much as it is a design direction.
Q. Will you create completely custom sites for churches?
A. Yes. Many of our clients, including organizations like the Salvation Army and Pioneer Camps, have unique criteria that do not fit within the scope of our Standard Designs. In such cases we custom design their website. Custom web development by GenEvange begins at a cost of $20,000 and can go up to $80,000 or more depending on the scope of the project.
Q. At what point do you think custom development is necessary?
A. We avoid it for churches whenever we can. Our Design Plates can be customized so effectively that most churches will never need a completely custom site again. Some very large or unique churches, however, might develop unique needs for their website that do not fit within the range of our Design Plate capability. Such was the case for The Salvation Army and Pioneer Camps mentioned above. If you think you fit into this category, contact us and we can explore the various possibilities with you.
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