CSL 003 – How to Choose a Hosting Provider for your Church Website

• Welcome to ChurchSpring Live, Episode 003 and Introductions (00:56)
• How to select a reliable hosting provider for your church website(06:30)
  • What is a website hosting provider? (06:40)
    • Your website host or hosting provider supplies the servers, security, and network that makes your website available on the world wide web. While many people overlook this important component, hosting has become very important as Google will rank your church website based on many factors.
  • How is a website hosting provider different from a domain hosting provider? (08:35)
  • What are some important factors when choosing a website hosting provider? (12:00)
    • Important factors include support, Search Engine Optimization (i.e., site speed), integration with your desired content management system and plugins, and bundles services such as site hosting, audio files, images, etc.
  • Do website providers offer email hosting? (20:21)
    • Some do, yes! Plus, we go on a rabbit trail (but an important one!) to watch out for up-sell tactics from some providers who offer products that you may not need or already have access t.
  • Q&A (26:41)
  • Action Step: Evaluate your existing website hosting provider and/or sign up with a reliable website hosting provider (have you tried out ChurchSpring yet?  Check us out in a free 7-day trial! (29:00)
• ChurchSpring How To (30:28)
  • How to use and update the blocks feature to customize your website (31:45)
  • Add a block, select from 10 block designs (32:55)
  • Customize your block background using the block menu (38:16)
• Closing Prayer (42:15)

Isabelle (00:56):

Hello there. Welcome to ChurchSpring live episode three. We are excited to have you here today. I see we already have some live viewers. This is awesome. Today we are going to talk about how to select a reliable hosting provider for your church website. So if you just heard that and you’re thinking, what does that even mean? That’s okay. Stay tuned. We are going to unpack a lot today. I am Isabelle with ChurchSpring. I’m on the customer happiness team and with me is the great Rohn Gibson cofounder of ChurchSpring. Our cofounders Mike and Rohn they’re great. We have an amazing, amazing staff here at ChurchSpring. We will love to hear from you. So if you are tuning in right now, drop a comment below, share your name, where you’re from your church.

Isabelle (01:55):

You will have to give stream yard permission to show your name and your comment. And then we can say hello to you and welcome you to the live stream here. So for those of you who are new to ChurchSpring, we are a software provider committed to the Great Commission. We we help church leaders by providing super practical tools, just like this live stream websites to really aid in growing the local church for the glory of Christ. So before we dive in, I have a few quick notes here. We want to answer as many questions as possible that we can. So this is your time. If you have questions about website hosting providers, or really just any questions about websites or church tech in general drop a comment. We, again, we will answer as many as we possibly can.

Isabelle (02:47):

Like I mentioned, you will need to give stream yard access so that we can display your profile picture and your comment on our live stream here. We definitely want to do that. And then if you have any prayer requests, we will actually be praying at the end of our show here today. Every Monday our team, we get together in the morning and we pray for our customers. So we actually ask our current customers, how can we pray? We pray with you. So they receive a couple of emails. So we want to pray with you. So drop a comment. If you’re not comfortable putting it in the comments, that’s okay. You can just shoot us an email or send us a contact form. So let us know how we can partner with you. If you also, haven’t already be sure to like our Facebook page, that way you’ll get notified when we go live. Every time. And my last note here that I want to go over is that this live stream show, we are going to try to keep it to 45 minutes and I’m going on record.

Rohn (03:53):

Yeah, here we go. Here we go.

Isabelle (03:57):

We can be a bit long winded. We love websites. We love technology. We love equipping the church. So Rohn and I get super excited when we hop on here. But this live stream will be available for rewatch immediately available on our Facebook page, but also on our website. You’ll be able to have access to show notes, a ton of additional resources and kind of helpful tips for this. You can access that the show notes at churchspring.com/csl003. So let me pop it up here. There you go. So that is where the rewatch for this video will be. Okay. So again, do you have any comments or questions here yet? We

Rohn (04:44):

Do. And let me just say this. One of the benefits of show notes is that you don’t have to worry about taking a bunch of notes during the time today. We’re literally going to give you all the notes. If we mention any resources, we’ll link those up in there. So you can just sit back, watch, ask your questions. We’ll answer as many as we can. And then you can check that out at churchspring.com/csl003. So there you go. We do have some people online right now. So this came in actually Jeremy Brown. So appreciate those kind words, brother. I hope you’re doing well. We’ve got a good question from Rosalynn that we are going to answer here a little bit later. So Rosa, and thank you for that. And again, if you do have a question, please feel free to throw it in here.

Rohn (05:37):

We have Marcella joining us love that name. We have Jason Whittaker joining us from Buffalo, New York from Emmanuel temple church of God. So Jason, thanks for joining us. I’m so glad to have you here. We also have, let’s see, Douglas. So welcome Douglas. We’re we’re glad you’re here from Nebraska. Just not too far from us actually. Well, not too far from me. So thank you for, yes. Thank you for joining us here today as well. So for those who are continuing to join, feel free, we want to engage with you here in the comments. If you have any questions please feel free to throw those in, but I know we’ve got a few to get us started, so why don’t we go ahead and jump on in.

Isabelle (06:28):

Awesome. Sounds good. So again, for those of you who are just now joining, we’re talking about how to select a reliable website hosting provider. So I know that that can be a little confusing of exactly what are we talking about? So Rohn, let’s just answer kind of the basic question here. What is a website hosting provider?

Rohn (06:50):

Yes. So website hosting provider ultimately is the service that supplies your servers, so where your actual files are stored. The security around that to make sure that hackers don’t get in there and mess with your information or the information of you know, whether it could be giving whatever those things are. It’s the security and security related to that as well as the network that connects you to the internet. So it makes the information from your website, the information that’s stored on those servers available to people when they go to your website. So again, I’ll use the example, churchspring.com. When people get to churchspring.com, it connects it, routes them to our server and pulls up those files that actually shows them the website on their screen. So that in a nutshell, and we could, we could go way deeper and talk about all kinds of things with redundancy and load balancing and all that stuff. But we’re not going to that most important part is that you understand it’s the servers, security and network, and ultimately it’s a service that makes your website and resources available to those that come to your church website.

Isabelle (08:04):

Yeah. Wow. That is an excellent way of describing that. Thank you, Rohn. We’re just gonna record that and then just have that on repeat when everybody’s wanting to ask what, what is a website provider? Real quick, pastor Jackson, I see that you just joined welcome. We are so excited to have you

Rohn (08:24):

Columbus, Ohio. We got a Buckeye, we got a Buckeye with us today, so born and raised in Ohio. So I’ll always love to see a Buckeyes join him. So anyway,

Isabelle (08:34):

That’s great. Okay. So Rohn, can you unpack for us, how is a website hosting provider different than a domain hosting provider? Because I know last week we did talk about domain hosting. What is a domain name? So how is a website hosting provider different from a domain hosting provider? Because I know when I’m working with customers, that can be kind of just a common confusion for good reason, because it’s, it’s, it can be confusing for someone who’s who’s new to this world.

Rohn (09:08):

Yes, absolutely. So a domain hosting provider is somebody that’s going to host the files related to your domain name. So a lot of people don’t understand this and I don’t want to get too crazy, but your domain name ultimately has multiple components to it. So if you kind of think of it as it’s kind of like the post office and the post office has multiple post office boxes inside that then go to different people, a domain name hosting service or domain name has set up kind of in a similar way, where there’s your website route or your website post office box, your email post office box. And we could go into a lot of other areas, but ultimately those are the files that ultimately direct to different services. And that’s, what’s hosted on the domain name, hosting provider, your website, hosting provider hosts, your website files. Yep. So that is different.

Isabelle (10:05):

So say that, say that one more time. That was, that was it right there.

Rohn (10:09):

Yeah. So your website hosting provider hosts, your website files, it’s different than your domain name that has all that information, that routes for email or website hosting. So I’ll just kind of give it as an example when somebody types in your domain name. So we’ll just, again, use church ring.com when they type that in, it takes them to our domain name, host. Okay. Our domain name hosting provider, which is typically provided through the registrar that you purchase your domain, name it, the traffic goes to your domain name host and says, okay, I want the website. So then it points it to your website hosting provider, which then pulls up the files and the visuals, all the media from your content, your images too, if you have video on there, whatever that might be, that’s where it pulls that information from.

Rohn (10:56):

And there’s also email hosting providers. We talked about that a little bit last week. So a domain name isn’t as simple as one may think. Again, just, just to try to simplify it, think of your domain name hosting, kind of as like the, the post office building and then inside of that building, there’s multiple PO boxes and then there’s PO boxes route to different places. So your www or your website route inside of your domain name would point to your website hosting provider, which then is what pulls up your website files.

Isabelle (11:36):

That’s great. Whew. That is excellent. Thank you from unpacking that for us. Yeah. Glad Gladlynn, I think I’m saying your name correctly, welcome. We’re excited to have you from Georgia. Thanks for, for introducing yourself there. Okay, Rohn, so now that we’ve kind of established the baseline of what is a website hosting provider, what are some factors that people need to be looking at when they are making the choice of choosing a website hosting provider?

Rohn (12:08):

Yes. So great question. So that number one is support. Let’s be honest. This is not one of the most fun topics to talk about. And honestly, even in, you know, whether it’s ministry or even in the business world, typically when you’re talking about servers or hosting, it’s in a negative light. So ultimately you want to choose a hosting provider that is you never talk about because that means it’s working and everything is up and functioning as it should. So if it doesn’t, you want to make sure that you have somebody that you can reach out to. So support is so important. I talked to people often that they’ve gone with a hosting provider. There’s no contact, no anything. They don’t know, okay, what am I supposed to do now that I have a hosting provider. They don’t understand the difference between a hosting provider and their content management system and how those two things work together, which I know we’ll talk about that a little bit, but support support is very important.

Rohn (13:03):

The second thing you want to think about, which a lot of people don’t understand is that your hosting provider can negatively or positively impact your organic ranking and Google. So your search engine ranking. So when somebody goes into Google and they type for searches, let’s say in Columbus, Ohio, since we have somebody from Columbus, Ohio here, if they’re looking for churches and Columbus, Ohio, your site speed, and how quickly your site loads is actually a ranking factor that Google monitors and will determine whether you’re on the first page of Google and high, how high up you are in the first page of Google or whether you’re on the 25th page of Google, which therefore no one’s really ever going to find. Right? So site speed is very important and that’s directly correlated to your website, hosting provider and their servers and infrastructure that they provide for you.

Rohn (13:56):

So understand that very important. The next thing to think about here when you’re choosing the provider is that there’s a difference again, between the content management system that runs your website. That’s the thing that you log into that you add content to the trouble that your images, your sermons, your events, all those sorts of things. That’s the content management system, which is a piece of software that sits on the server and actually then makes your website available. So a lot of people don’t understand the difference between those two things. We have people even tell us at ChurchSpring while you are a host, which is true because we bundle it all together, right. But ultimately if you go out and you choose for those people that don’t use church ring, we want to add value to you to their services like WordPress, Wix. I mean, you could literally create a, a list, a mile long of website, content management systems out there that are just very well people think, well, I can just choose this website, content management system and put it on any old server and it’s going to work.

Rohn (14:58):

And that isn’t the case. There are things that you need to think about in relation to the integration between your content management system and the server slash hosting provider that you choose. So that’s an important factor. Yeah. And then, you know, there are a lot of, I know a lot of the ministries that we’re blessed to serve. Let’s just be honest. They don’t, they don’t do this for a living. They’re not out there looking at, you know, servers and researching Amazon web services. And like, just get thrilled about that. A lot of people, when they see the Amazon web service commercials on TV, they’re like, what is that? I don’t even know what that is. They probably just meet it. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. Or just, you know, fast forward. So it’s important to realize that it doesn’t have to be difficult if you’re not a super technical person and you don’t want to have to look okay.

Rohn (15:47):

What’s my content management system and what are the server requirements for my content management system to run correctly and therefore, okay, I need to go out and find a hosting provider that has servers and database servers and whatever that can do all of these things. So my website runs really effectively. That’s where companies like ChurchSpring, we bundle it all together. So we offer the website platform. So it’s the design, the backend, what we call content management system, which is what you actually log into to make changes on your website. That’s the content management system. In addition to that, we provide, we provide the hosting just as a bundle of services. So you don’t have to go in there and try to figure out, okay, which content management system do I want to use, which hosting provider does it go to? Okay. Now how do I connect all those things together with my domain name, it’s a pain.

Rohn (16:40):

And it takes so much time to think through that process, if you will have to do that. Yes. And so that’s just your, your jam. So to speak, you’re not really technical. You don’t really want to get into that. That’s where church band can be really beneficial. And the really cool thing with ChurchSpring, our goal is really to simplify it. And I don’t, this is not meant to be a sales pitch in any way. But we really try to simplify it, honestly, that that’s been one of our goals. We want to level the technology playing field for the church. We don’t want you, if you’re a 30 member church or even less to, you know, several hundred. I mean, we have churches, they use us that are several thousand members, but we don’t want the smaller church to not have some of the capabilities that the larger church has because they have a larger church staff that understands technology and how all these parts and pieces come together.

Rohn (17:26):

And that’s why with ChurchSpring, we’ve bundled it all together, as well as we’ve given you tools, like you can upload your audio that automatically creates a podcast feed and does all of those things for you. So it’s just all bundled, but ultimately when it comes to the important factors that you need to consider when choosing a website, hosting provider, number one, do they have support? Number two are their servers and their infrastructure set up to be lightening fast. So you get as much of the benefit from a Google search engine ranking perspective as possible. Number two, does that automatically integrate with your desired content management system, whatever that might be if it’s different than ChurchSpring. And then again, if you are using ChurchSpring, we take care of all that for you. So you can literally check the box. You’re done. You’ve got what you need to do. Everything that we’ve just talked.

Isabelle (18:15):

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That was incredibly helpful. I w on the support side, we get the question of how can we help our church appear higher up on the, on Google, Yelp, all those search engines and that site speed. That’s not something that is super well known if you’re new to the website world. So that is incredibly helpful. I hope for all of our listeners right now, your site speed does impact where you appear in your search results. So talk that away, keep that kind of nugget. That was, that was really helpful for me. Pastor Jackson, thank you. You’re, you’re great. You posted a comment here at church. Spring support is off the charts, the best of ever some awesome praising cut for you all, all. Well, I’ve enjoyed working with you, actually, pastor Jackson. I know that we’ve communicated back and forth actually. So I, I’m always blessed and I work with you and your ministry. So thanks for tuning in and for leaving this amazing comment. We just, yeah, it, it gets us so

Rohn (19:27):

Isabel and Jen on our support team work very, very hard to support all of the members of church thing. We really do look at you all like family and just really feel blessed to be able to serve you. So I really appreciate that. So awesome to hear. So thank you.

Isabelle (19:42):

Yeah. All right, Rohn. So we have one last question here. And for all you listeners, if you have any other questions that are kind of popping up in your head at comment them on the video here, or if you’re not really sure what your question is, but you just have a thought or a comment about what we just talked about. We also want to hear that drop, drop that comment and we can even, we can unpack something for you if you’re confused about something, even, so let us know where you’re at and we want to help you out there. All right, Rohn. So last question here that we have do website providers offer email hosting. So I wanted to talk about that today. Because that is another frequent frequently asked question that really we get, we get a lot and our heart at ChurchSpring obviously is to really support the church and the ministry. So can you answer that and maybe give some, some tips for next steps? Absolutely.

Rohn (20:48):

So to answer the question, some website hosting providers offer email and some don’t, but all depends on what hosting provider you go with. So, like I mentioned with ChurchSpring, so I’ll speak specifically for us. So we do host websites. So we do website hosting. However, we do not offer email hosting. And here’s why, so a lot of the hosting providers that do offer email as part of their services, to be very transparent with you and just very open and honest, they provide an inferior email hosting, email hosting solution, then something that as a church you can get for free. So I’m sure spring, if we can’t do it better than something that’s already available, then we just decide, Hey, we’re just going to tell you where to go to get it for free. And, and we also like to practice what we preach.

Rohn (21:42):

So we actually, the service that we use, it’s not free for us because we’re not a nonprofit, but for many churches, they can qualify and get some of these services as a nonprofit. So to answer the question, do website providers offer email hosting, some do, but I guarantee you it’s going to be inferior and probably a little bit more difficult than some of the free options that are available to you. So I know maybe we weren’t planning on going into this, but I do want to just mention it Google for nonprofits. If you have not looked at that, I would highly encourage you to check it out. Just do a Google search for Google nonprofits. We’ll even throw it in the show notes again. Just so you can go and have a direct link to that. There’s an application. You fill out the beauty of Google for nonprofits, as well as another service that I’ll provide is they give you an entire office suite.

Rohn (22:32):

So if you think of similar similarly to like Microsoft office, you buy it, you install it on any computer, you get outlook for email, you get Microsoft word, you get Microsoft Excel, you get all these tools or with Google, for nonprofits, you get all those things under the Google suite. So it’s not Microsoft obviously, but you get things like basically Google, Google mail at your domain name. So it’s not at Gmail, it’s support@churchspring.com. Um you have Google docs, which is similar to a Microsoft word. You have a Google sheets, which is similar. So they have a whole lot of offerings, I mean, we could talk about that. Maybe that’s a future episode. If you’re interested in learning more about these free applications that are out there and how you might be able to use them in your church, again, it’s not related to directly what we do, but if we can add value to you in that way, we’d love to share more resources.

Rohn (23:22):

So you just tell us, we nerd out about this stuff. Again, our first two episodes, nerd is a term of endearment at church bang. We embrace that wholeheartedly. That’s right. I like that. That’s the only way Google for nonprofits, check it out. It can be free for your ministry. Another service that’s available as well. This one limits you to a number. So, you know, a lot of people in smaller churches, specifically a Zoho is the name of the company. If you do a Google search Zoho email, and you’ll see at the top of their page, they’ll have different pricing and plans. But if you scroll down, they actually have a free option for people that need five or less different email accounts. So that’s another option. If for whatever reason you’re not approved or you don’t really feel comfortable with going through the Google for nonprofits application process, then you can always go over to Zoho mail.

Rohn (24:17):

They have a very similar thing as far as kind of their own version of Google docs and all that. As far as an office suite, I know that’s beyond email. But that’s what I’m talking about. So when you, and you’re going to get upsold, when you, when you go and purchase your domain name nearly no matter who you purchase it from, they’re going to try to upsell you hoping they’re going to try to up sell you email. They’re going to try to upsell you private listings. They’re going to think. I mean, my goodness, they, you kind of feel like you’ve been through the ringer after you purchase a domain name last week. I think his name was Marty actually, and I may be mistaken that, but he had told us that he’d paid $224, I think for is his domain name. Don’t do that. There are so many great free options out there in the area of email hosting specifically. So check out Google for nonprofits or check Zoho, great options for you.

Isabelle (25:13):

Great. And along that line of thought run if you’re a current customer of short spring or really if you’re not a current customer, and if you have a question about shall I be purchasing this because I’m going through the process of purchasing email or a domain name or really anything that you have to purchase for your church. And if you’re not sure if you should purchase an Adam, just contact us had a customer this week that Jen on our support team she was answering and our customer was asking was basically give a bullet list of these are the things that my domain provider is telling me that I should purchase. Do I actually need to buy these? And the answer was no, he did not need to buy them because we offered a, an SSL certificate. We offer a secure and encrypted as a website hosting provider, we offer a secure

Rohn (26:10):

Yeah. And that’s, and that’s really important. So security is actually, and we talked about that at a very high level, but your SSL it’s called a, it’s a short for SSL security certificate. That’s why people, you don’t want people to see a security warning when they come to your site. It’s actually now all the modern browsers are going to give alerts and warnings to people that come to a non-secure site. So again, that’s another thing we’ve just bundled in. It’s important. It is a ranking factor. It’s good for your users. So we’ve decided just to go ahead and bundle that in. We did have a question actually that came in yesterday from this, but I want to go ahead and answer it there from Rosalynn. Hopefully I pronounced that correctly. Let’s see, need to really understand what I, and I know she clarified later on, sorry, host provider.

Rohn (26:57):

So understand what a hosted provider is thoughts that’s what your service provides. So we’re kind of the bundle, right? So we, we provide your website, your church website, content management system, in addition to hosting the SSL, all those components. So yes, you’re correct. We do provide it. So if you’re looking at ChurchSpring, maybe you’re not a customer of ChurchSpring right now, and you’re looking at ChurchSpring thinking, Oh, do I need to go find a hosting provider or a security certificate? No, you don’t. We bundle all that together. It’s all included to make it super easy for you to do. Literally, if you’re not a ChurchSpring member, you can literally create your website and launch it in less than 90 seconds. We actually just recorded a video yesterday that we’re going to put out where we did just that. So anyway, if there’s any questions on that, again, any other questions that are coming up, let’s see. Do we have any others that have come in?

Isabelle (27:51):

We do have a question from Jason here. Let me display that. Okay. So he says I’ve been having difficulty transferring a video from another platform, which is an app that we’ve been using for some, for some time to the website and the sermon section. It appears that Facebook or YouTube or most popular platforms to do this, but if those haven’t been used in previous recordings, is it not possible to transfer from that app? Jason, it sounds like this may be something that we can help you with one-on-one in your website so that we can make sure we’re really understanding the platform you’re using and kind of what your goal is. So if you can just go ahead and send us a ticket in your ChurchSpring website we will make sure to hop on and help you out and, and get all your, your sermons uploaded in time. Yup. Yup.

Rohn (28:44):

Yeah. And the only thing I would add there is there’s probably a way for you to be able to either download that and then upload it to a service like YouTube is really easy and then you can embed that, but yeah. Perfect. Definitely reach out to support. We want to make sure we got you covered and got that taken care of.

Isabelle (29:00):

Yeah. All right. You’re welcome, Jason. Okay. So Rohn, for everybody who’s listening we just learned a lot about website providers. What is a next step, an action item that people can take as a way to move forward with this.

Rohn (29:19):

Perfect. So ultimately a good next step is to evaluate your current hosting provider and then sign up for a reliable one. If you’re having issues, getting in contact with support or any of those types of things, it’s time to really evaluate that and take some next steps toward a better solution there for your ministry. So that would be the action item for you to do. And again, if you’re with ChurchSpring, we offer hosting as part of it. We’ve done some major, major things over the last really three to six months. We’re on a world-class hosting platform. We have got you covered. I literally just got off the phone call with a gentleman that oversees all of our server management and we have some very, very high standards that we hold ourselves to. So we’ve got you covered, but if you’re not on ChurchSpring and you’re having issues evaluate it based on that criteria, and then you can make decisions on what’s best for you.

Isabelle (30:17):

That’s great. That’s really great. All right. So I don’t see any other questions here that are coming in. So again, if you have questions, drop a comment below, we will get to that. I want to kind of take us to behind the scenes of ChurchSpring and walk you through how to use what is, what we call the blocks feature. So I’ll share my screen here, but again as everybody is listening, if you have questions about website providers that pops into your head, you still drop a comment and then we can come back to it at the end here. So let me share my screen here. All right, perfect.

Isabelle (31:04):

And there we go. Alright, so I’m going to all right. So I am on my demo website. It is using the flourish plan here. So if you’re a current ChurchSpring member and you’re on the sprout or the grill plan your settings may look a little different than what you’re viewing here. But that is, yeah, this is, this is a flourish plan. So I want to walk you through again, what we call the blocks feature. So the blocks feature is honestly one of my favorite features of ChurchSpring. I can talk to them. Yeah. I can talk a long time about this. So Rohn, if you just need to cut me off and say, got it in this thing, do it, but the blocks feature is an awesome way that you can personalize and customize your content to your website.

Isabelle (31:58):

So if you’re new to ChurchSpring, and you’re not really sure how we work you can literally launch your website in 90 seconds. That is not a marketing spiel. It is true. And when you get your new website, we actually add ready to go pages with text already populated and your website. So it’s a really cool way that you can just update your texts instead of starting from scratch, because that can be overwhelming. So what you’re seeing here on my dental site, this is actually texts. That is, that is already populated as soon as I launched my website here. So yeah, this is text, ready to go. And then the blocks feature is if you want to add your own kind of twist to your website, so I’ll walk you through and we can see what I’m talking about here. You know, that you can add the, a block when you see this little plus icon.

Isabelle (32:58):

So you’ll just click on the plus icon and it will pull up all of the awesome blocks that you can insert. So there’s ten one, two three, four, five. Yep. There’s 10 different block designs that you can insert. There’s we have a blank text block, so I’ll just click on that real quick so that everybody can kind of see what that looks like. There’s placeholder text here. This is designed just so that you can see what the layout will look like. So you can simply remove all that text and say, welcome to our church type on whatever you want to. This is an area that you can also add a video embed code. So from YouTube or Facebook or Vimeo, you can also change the styling of your font. So probably want to, wouldn’t want to make that kind of all caps.

Isabelle (33:58):

Then I can do that. And then you can click save and it’ll immediately save in real time. So the the text block there, the blank text block you have a lot of freedom with that. So that is kind of a good block to add first, just so you can play around with just to see what you can do with the block, what you can do with different text editing. It’s, it’s very fun. So I, I want to go over a little bit of each of the blocks here, and then I’ll dive into some really cool ways you can customize each of the blocks. So for the events and the sermons block, and I just love clicking into the blocks. I show everybody what it is. So I’m just going to show you this events block. So the events block and the sermons block right now, and I say right now, because we have a lot on a roadmap of what we’ll be adding for new features, but right now the events and the sermons block that will pull content from any page that you’ve added to your website that uses a sermons page design or any events design.

Isabelle (35:13):

So we will be adding some really cool ways to customize this with tags and categories. So you can say only pull events from men’s ministry, let’s say so that’ll be coming down the road, but right now, this is a really neat way to kind of add some customization to your website. You can always remove the block if you add it and you think, no, that’s not quite going to go with what I’m doing. That’s fine. Just hit this trash. Can I come? It will give you a prompt. Do you want to remove this block? You hit yes. And wallah. It is gone. All right, I’ll show you a couple others here. We have a contact form block, so you can add that anywhere, the map block. So that’s really cool. Let’s say you have a youth ministry page and you want to add the blocks so that people can easily click where to go for your, your Wednesday youth gathering at your church.

Isabelle (36:12):

You can add that map block. We also have some different image and text button layouts. So this left image block this populates with a header, text, a button, which buttons are really fun on websites. And then you can also add an image to kind of spice things up. So I’m just going to kind of live off of this real quick, and I’ll show you how you can customize this block and change colors and change the background. So let’s say for this, you want to add a block on your homepage to link internally for prayer requests. So I would upgrade the text. You can change the button text here. So the default is learned more. You can say click here to submit, well, that’s really long for a button. So we’re just gonna say click here. And then you can change the link destination by clicking this a hyperlink that says link, and then a popup window will appear.

Isabelle (37:23):

You can link internally to any of your current website pages, or you can also link externally. So if there’s a website a URL that’s not on your own website, you can just paste that URL in here. For this I’m just going to add prayer request hit save, and then that button will just update with that link. I can also add an image. You will have access to the ChurchSpring library, your own images. So let’s just add this image here and I am live streaming with slow wifi. So if there’s a delay for anybody, it’s because my wifi is really chugging along here today. And then, so that’s cool. We have the block ready to go, but let’s say if we want to add some pizzazz and some color to the background, we can do that. I love the background. This is one of my favorite parts of the blocks. You can do a couple of different options for background colors or I’m sorry for background color or background video, or a background image. So first, if you want to change your background to a color you

Isabelle (38:41):

Literally only place your mouse over this color menu item, and then this popup color palette will appear. And you’ll have some theme colors to choose from. So let’s say I want this dark blue to be the background, not a big fan of that, but we’ll just change it to black. Okay. That’s awesome. However, you can’t read the text anymore, and that is why just wait, you can change the font. You can change the font color from black to white. So this is a really cool feature because that’s how you can really customize it to your specific brand colors. So I’m gonna change this back because this is kind of hard to, to view. So if you want to add a background image or video, you’ll simply click on the background menu there. And I’ll show you how you can add a video.

Isabelle (39:37):

You’ll select the video tab, and I have a YouTube video here, ready to go. Right now you, you do have to have a video up on YouTube to add it as a background video. You’ll simply paste that link into your pop up here. And then you’ll kind of see a little preview there. You do have to select an image to display on mobile as a lot of mobile devices, don’t support video background. And if someone is experiencing slow wifi on the desktop, then the image will appear instead of the video while the video buffers. So you can just click and then you can upload your own file for that image. So I’ll just select that image as my background, I’ll hit save, and I think I may have lost my wifi connection on that. Sorry, guys. All right, let’s do that again. Alright, go ahead. Say one more time.

Rohn (40:54):

Isn’t it fun demoing live.

Isabelle (40:56):

Oh yeah.

Rohn (41:02):

It’s probably having a hard time logging cause of your internet.

Isabelle (41:06):

Yes. Rohn can attest. I have slow wifi over here. It’s rough

Rohn (41:13):

Mountain air over there. It’s too high.

Isabelle (41:14):

That’s exactly it. All right. Well it does show a video background. My wifi is not loading that right now. I’m so sorry about that, but if you’re, if you’re a current member of ChurchSpring reach out, we can walk through that process. Otherwise we have a lot of resources that we can show you how to do that here. I know we’re running out of time here, so I should probably pass it off to you, Rohn, so that I won’t keep talking about the amazing block features. But if you have any questions, if again, if you’re a current member or if you’re new to ChurchSpring., Not yet a member reach out we want to show you all the different ways that you can customize your website

Rohn (42:01):

And blocks. I echo what you said there is about blocks is such a cool feature. It’s nearly limitless what you can do with blocks. I mean, you can really let your imagination go and create some really, really cool things we’ve got and we’ll show these in future episodes. So definitely stay tuned. We have quite a few ChurchSpring members who have done some pretty cool things with blocks. So we will absolutely share those here in the days ahead, but we want to go and take prayer requests. If you do have any prayer requests, it’s going to excuse me, scan through real quickly. See if there’s any prayer requests. I know we’ve had a few come in this week for, let’s see pastor Martinez their churches opening on six 14. They also have a member who’s lost both parents due to COVID.

Rohn (42:47):

So we will definitely keep them in that ministry and prayer. We also had a prayer request that came in last week actually after we had prayed. So I want to circle back to that. Benjamin cornerstone had asked for the prayer, a friend of our family just lost her husband, a father of her children in soulmate last night, unexpectedly five children now without a father, he is in heaven, but they remain in our heartbroken. Please pray for Peter. So we are going to definitely pray for pastor Benjamin specifically as he in the church, their minister to that family of a friend who lost a husband and a father. So we’ll give him just a couple of minutes here to have any other prayer requests come in and why we do that. I want to go ahead and just invite you. We would love to have you join us again next week.

Rohn (43:37):

We’re going to do these every Thursday. There may be some weeks where we tweak it a little bit, but in general, we’re going to do every Thursday at 10:00 AM central time. So please join us. We will be sending out emails and communication and posting an event on Facebook with the topic of what we’re going to cover. Obviously today’s was a little bit of a super technical topic. But they’re going to vary. We’re going to get into social media, some design things. It’s going to be a lot of fun. So definitely stay tuned and submit your questions to us. If there are things you’d like to hear about, I’m absolutely pleased submit those to us. And we will look at potentially adding those. So if you drop us out, so Jason just submitted a prayer request. And my goodness, I think we all echo that right now, just peace for our nation in our world which we know where the source of peace truly come from and who is the source of peace.

Rohn (44:29):

So we will definitely pray for that. All right. Well, for sake of time, let’s see. I don’t see any others. Okay. Let’s go ahead and pray for these requests and then we’ll wrap up from there. So let’s go out and pray, dear God, I thank you for your love for us, Lord. I thank you for your grace, your mercy Lord. I thank you for your church. And I thank you for those who have joined us now, as well as those who are watching it later. And God I ask that you would give them strength and endurance Lord we’re in a, in a world right now in a time that is extremely difficult with so much going on. And Lord, I just ask that you would give each person that hears Lord this prayer and this episode, Lord, that you would give them strength that you would give them endurance and that they would Lord rest in you and trust in you and look to you for that strength and endurance and not try to do it in and on in, and have their own strength. So God, again, I just pray that you would bless your church. What I pray that you would help us to truly be a salt and light Lord in a dark time. So Lord, I ask that you would or that you would bring peace and Lord, we know where true peace comes from and that’s from you and an understanding of who you are, how great you are

Rohn (45:44):

Lord, how majestic and good and awesome you are. Lord. That’s a term that gets used way too much and in an inappropriate way. But Lord, we know that you are truly the only awesome thing. So Lord, we thank you for who you are and are, and for who you’ve called us to be. So God, I pray that you would help us to be peacemakers. Lord, I pray Lord that you would break our hearts for those that don’t know you, what I pray that you would give us such deep love for them and for the lost Lord that we can’t not share about the hope and the peace that lives in us. So God, I pray that you would bring peace on. I pray that you would continue to draw those to you and what I pray that you would help us Lord as your church to continue to be fishers of men.

Rohn (46:45):

So Lord, go before us give us courage. Or I do think of the prayer requests that were mentioned, Lord, from Benjamin or to this family that lost a husband and a father. God, I pray that Lord. They would sense your presence, Lord, that they would find hope and peace Lord in you. It’s a lot. I pray that you would give them much mercy and grace. So I pray that you would help the church there, the local church there to be your church or to love on them, to stand in the gap and the best way that they can, that you’ve called them to, or to be a blessing to that family. So God, I pray that you had worked through Benjamin through the church and God, I pray that you would give grace and mercy, that family Lord, I also ask that you would be with pastor Ray Lord, is there a church is going to open on the 14th? What I pray that you would be again with that family who lost both parents due to COVID. So God, I pray that you would, man, just give just an abundance of grace and mercy and healing. And then when I pray that you would draw them to yourself.

Rohn (48:00):

So Lord, I pray that you would work as you are.

Rohn (48:05):

So Lord, we again, thank you for this time together. Thank you for this opportunity to utilize Lord technology, to connect, to encourage each other, to provide resources Lord, and or most importantly to come together as your church to pray Lord, for those who are hurting for those who are going through difficult times. So I pray that you would be with all the churches that are beginning that process of reopening their local gatherings. God, I pray that you would give them discernment. And Lord, I pray that you would just give abundant grace for those who are dealing with it. And just different ways, Lauren, we pray that ultimately there would be unity and there would be love because that’s what you have called us to. So Lord help us to love you, help us to love others appropriately.

Rohn (49:00):

Lord, we love you in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. All right. So as I said earlier, next Thursday, 10:00 AM. Central time. Submit your questions. We’d love to answer as many of those as we can. And then just God bless you all. And we look forward to seeing you all next week. So have a good rest of your day, everyone. And we will see you all next Thursday. Thanks for joining. Goodbye.