Digital Doulos › Services › Websites
The website is the easy part. Year two is the hard part.
Almost no church website fails at launch. They fail in month nineteen, when the volunteer who built it moved to Charlotte, the theme needs updating, and the Christmas Eve times have said 2024 since February.
$99 a month · the build itself is freeOne church, one week
time from email to liveNot software. An arrangement.
What a good church website should contain is on the homepage, and we build all of it. This page is about the other thing — what it is like to have us as your webmaster for the next four years.
This is the whole product, and it looks like this.
No ticket number, no portal, no help centre. You write the way you'd write to anyone. We reply having done it.
Harold Tate passed this morning. Service Thursday 11am here. Can we put something on the site tonight? Family is asking. Photo attached, not sure if it's the right one.
Done — it's live now, top of the homepage, and it'll come down on its own Friday morning so you don't have to think about it again.
I used the photo you sent. Cropped it a little so it works on a phone; if the family would rather have a different one, send it over and I'll swap it.
Added the service to the calendar and put parking directions underneath, since a fair number of people coming Thursday won't have been to the building before. I'm sorry about Harold.
That is a real shape of request, and it is why the answer to “can't we just use a template?” is usually no. Not because the template can't hold a page — because at nine on a Tuesday evening, somebody has to make it.
What we're doing while you're doing ministry.
A church website is not a steady thing. It has a shape, and the shape is the church calendar — which means the busiest weeks for the site are also the busiest weeks for your staff. That is exactly the point of paying somebody else to hold it.
The two heaviest weeks — Holy Week and Christmas Eve — are the two weeks a church staff has least capacity to update a website, and the two weeks the most strangers are looking at it. Every church knows this and almost none of them has a plan for it.
The work doesn't disappear. It moves.
Every option here costs somebody something. The only question is who, and whether they signed up for it.
| DIY template | A volunteer | Us, at $99 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who makes the Tuesday change | Your office administrator, after hours | Whoever answers first | We do, and you get an email back |
| What happens at Christmas | It gets done late, or not | They're travelling too | Planned in October, live in November |
| Cost when the person leaves | — | A rebuild, and often the domain | Nothing. Continuity is the product |
| Who holds the domain | You, if you set it up right | Frequently them, on a personal account | You. Always. In writing |
| Sunday morning outage | Support opens Monday | Depends who's awake | We're watching, and we escalate loudly |
| Evidence it's working | A dashboard nobody opens | None | One page, first of the month |
We are not against volunteers — a church with a genuinely willing, genuinely available person who knows what they're doing should keep them, and we'll hand over the files free so they have something good to work with. What we're against is a church assuming it has that person for the next four years.
How you get rid of us.
Worth putting on the page rather than in a contract nobody reads. This is the part of the arrangement most churches have been burned by, and being conspicuously clean about it is deliberate.
- Step 1You send an email.There is no notice period, no exit interview and no retention call. A month at a time means a month at a time.
- Step 2We send the files and the written page.The complete site, the source, and the one-page document explaining exactly how to host it elsewhere — the same document we hand you on launch day, before you have any reason to want it.
- Step 3Your domain does nothing at all.Because it was never ours. It is registered to your church, in an account your church controls, and the only thing we ever had was permission to point it. You change one record.
Why this is on a sales page
Because the market is full of stories about the web person who vanished with the domain, and a promise is worth less than a procedure. If we ever stop being worth $99 a month, the leaving should be boring. Making it boring is a feature we built on purpose.
The things churches actually ask.
Is it really free, or is there a setup fee hiding somewhere?
Really free. We design and build the whole site at no charge, and if you decide at the end that you'd rather host it yourself, you take every file and owe us nothing. The $99 is only if you want us to stay on and run it.
Is there a limit on "unlimited"?
In practice, yes, and we'd rather name it than pretend. Content changes are unlimited — text, photos, events, sermons, a new ministry page, a funeral at nine at night. What isn't included is a second website, an e-commerce store, a custom application, or a redesign every quarter because someone saw a nicer church site in Nashville. If a request is outside it we'll say so and quote it rather than quietly slow down.
Who at our church do you actually work with?
Usually the office administrator, not the pastor — they're the one who knows the calendar is wrong. We'll take requests from anyone you name, and we ask for one person who can approve a change without a committee. That single decision is the difference between three weeks and three months.
We already have a site. Is moving worth the disruption?
Sometimes not, and we'll tell you. If your current site is serving you well we'll say so and wish you a good Sunday. If it isn't, the move takes about three weeks and almost none of it is your work — send us your last three bulletins, your logo and a sermon link, and we draft from those.
Will you break our email when you move the domain?
No. We record every existing mail setting before touching anything. The most common way a church website migration goes wrong is the pastor's inbox going dark, and it will not happen here.
Can we have a members-only area and a photo directory?
We won't build those, and it's one of the few things we're firm about. Congregational data deserves better protection than a church website budget can honestly buy — including ours. We'd rather say that plainly than take the money and hope.
A good website doesn't make anyone find you.
It's the front door. Whether a stranger ever walks up the path is a different job — and it's the one we're best at.
Twenty minutes on the phone.
No proposal, no slide deck, no pressure. Tell us about your congregation and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.