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Indexing your business with google and submitting your web site as part of the information will make finding your web site much easier for anyone out there searching for it. Please watch this video tutorial for more information and how to do this.

A few things are needed from the parish in order for us to get started with your web site.

1) Decide Organization of Site – Many parishes will just let us decide where things should go. We are okay with that. If you have a certain way you would like to organize the content of the site, please lay it out in an email or Word document. It is often helpful to look at some other church websites. When you are sending us information in a word document, please edit the file as little as possible. Refrain from using tabs, color, or fonts. These are things we will work on later.

2) Pick Domain Name – The domain name is the web address of your site (example www.yourparish.com). It is best to keep the web address simple and easy to remember. You may use this address for advertising and announcements so you will want people to be able to memorize it easily. Keep in mind that some Domain Names may already be taken so you will want to have a couple of choices.

3) Find High Quality Pictures – We can do so much with good high quality pictures. When designing a new site, we appreciate 10-20 high quality pictures to play around with. Send us these pictures right away so we can get started on the look of your site. If you want pictures of staff, start working on that. If ministries or organizations have their own page, you may want a picture that represents them also.

4) Get Content – Content is the most important part of the site. If your website does not have the information that people are looking for, they may never come back. When deciding on content, think about the people who are not a member of your parish and want to see what your parish offers and the parishioners that go there often to get the latest information and news. Start asking all of the organizations in your parish to send in at least a half a page of information about their ministry. Give them our email address and have them send updates as often as they would like.

5) Payments – Once you have agreed to let us work for you, we will set you up with a client login and password to our site. From there you will find a list of invoices for the work agreed upon for the next year, including a down payment $200. We do not start on a site until this down payment is paid. The rest of the set-up fee is paid for after the set-up is completed.

Every parish is different. We will be in touch and will email or call you with questions about the website. Check your site often and let us know what you think. Remember, it is your website. If you want something changed, do not be afraid to let us know!

Set up Email Accounts

Every client that hosts through us receives unlimited email accounts with unlimited storage in each of those accounts. These email accounts are great in that they use your domain name as the ending address which provides all of your staff with much more professional email addresses than they may currently be using (example yourname@yourdomain.com). It can also make it easier for staff to remember each others email addresses if you use a standard method in creating them.

We will set up these email addresses for you for free anytime you need them as part of your maintenance. The email addresses can be used through outlook (or other email programs) or checked online at anytime.

Because many staff would prefer to not have ‘another’ email account, a forwarding system can be set up as well. When a forwarding system is set up there is no actual email account set up, but when someone sends an email to the more ‘professional’ address, it will automatically be sent to the email account that the staff member that it is set up to forward to. The only downfall of this is that when they respond to the person that sent the email, their ‘cutsy’ email address will be the one that appears.

To set up the email account, we just need an email from a contact that we have from your parish or business and we will email you with the instructions. When you send an email please give us the email address that you would like created. Please see below for how to access email online from any computer and how to set up the email through a program such as Outlook.

To learn about changing your email password, setting up auto-responders, etc. Click Here

To check email online from any computer and web browser
1. Go to https://yourdomain.com:2096 (for example for us at Parish Web Assistant to check our email online we would go to https://parishwebassistant.com:2096.

2. The username will be your whole email address and the password will be the password assigned to your account.

Setting up Email through Outlook or other Mail client

We can help you with this over the phone or if you have someone who is technology ‘savvy’ around the office, this is the information that they will need along with the password for your account.

Mail Server Username: Full Email Account
Incoming Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com
Incoming Mail Server: (SSL) secure211.sgcpanel.com
Outgoing Mail Server: mail.yourdomain.com (server requires authentication) port 2525
Outgoing Mail Server: (SSL) secure211.sgcpanel.com (server requires authentication) port 465
Supported Incoming Mail Protocols: POP3, POP3S (SSL/TLS), IMAP, IMAPS (SSL/TLS)
Supported Outgoing Mail Protocols: SMTP, SMTPS (SSL/TLS)

 

You may have seen the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy on websites before. We are able to provide some sample forms for you to help you come up with these for your own website.

Terms of Use – is a legal document that explains to the users/viewers of your web site what they can and can not do with the information on your site. It also explains that you will not be liable for people misusing the information that you post.

Privacy Policy – is a legal document that explains what you will and will not do with the information you receive from the people who visit your site. It is like a promise but also an explanation for your users. This is extremely important to have on your site if you collect information from people through forms or receive payments online.

Clients may send us an email requesting a sample form for each of these. The forms we send should not be used in place of legal advice but they do provide a good help for them. Parish Web Assistant or Gallaweb will not be responsible for writing up these documents, but will post them when the business sends a completed copy.

This video is helpful for our clients that are trying to email pictures that are too large in file size. Often times we will optimize photos on our end. Clients may have a headache trying to email several photos to us at one time, so this video is here for them.

This videos will show you how to make it easier to send several files through email or ftp. Zipping files puts many files in to one package and compresses them to make it easier to send. Use this if you are needing to send several files at one time and it should allow you to fit more files in to one email.