I received a call today from Pastor Wilkerson of Maranatha Baptist Church in Rantoul Illinois.
I set up a starter website for them at http://rantoul-il.maranatha-baptist.us back in 2006.
We spoke back in January and he was looking into options for creating a permanent website for their church. Among other things he was going to look at Crown Web. I think that Crown Web has a fantastic, template based service but I from what I had heard I thought they were pricy ($17.95 per month). He looked into Crown Web, and he said they were asking for $30 per month. This is very expensive. A shared server solution with is available with Unlimited disk space, unlimited domain hosting and unlimited bandwidth for $5-$7 per month. The service comes with free setup, a free domain, and allsorts of free software (including the templates we use, as well as software like WordPress, Mambo, Joomla, Xoops etc). We are an affiliate (if you are looking to do something like this, we can get a commission – you can investigate and sign up at lypha.ekklesia-online.com) of one.
Another company he had looked at that sets up church websites wanted a $695 set up fee.
Pastor Wilkerson wants to get some software to create the website locally and upload the software to a hosted website. We provide hosting at no charge. He can do that with our ministry, the hosting service I referenced earlier would support this as well. In the interim, I registered a domain for them (www.maranatharantoul.com), set up the templates, and sent off his login information. He will working on the templates over the next few days. The domain is registered in the church's name.
We are a Faith Based ministry, we trust the lord will provide for us, and want to help Independent Baptist Ministries get online. I do not charge for anything I do, I am doing this for the Lord.
