Comments on: Software as a Service serving First Baptist Church of Frederick Maryland http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/2006/04/30/software-as-a-service-serving-first-baptsit-church-of-frederick-maryland/ Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design. Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:14:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9 hourly 1 By: Troy http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/2006/04/30/software-as-a-service-serving-first-baptsit-church-of-frederick-maryland/comment-page-1/#comment-2826 Troy Tue, 31 Oct 2006 20:18:45 +0000 http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/2006/04/30/software-as-a-service-serving-first-baptsit-church-of-frederick-maryland/#comment-2826 I signed up with CCB largely due to the favorable regard it recieved here. We used it for one year, but decided to go another way. My take on CCB is they are focused on the membership and database side, and the Web site side gets less attention. That was a poor fit for us, because we wanted to start with a good web site tool and then grow into other features. Also, their "upgrades" were not optional and dragged us down some paths we didn't want to go, like fixed-width templates, RSS in my menu, and so on. The final straw was an upgrade where they decided to simplify the article publishing model by eliminating the "draft" category from the publishing scheme. They didn't notify us of this beforehand. So after the upgrade, all my draft (incomplete, test, private) articles were published! We're now using Joomla as our site CMS. It was quite a learning curve for me, but now I have all the control I sought with CCB and never found, plus a great deal of power from the robust third-party extensions community. I don't have everything in place as I want just yet, but I have many more options now. Granted, I'm probably not typical. I have a technical background, and am familiar with programming. I spent the last few days hacking the open source code on my site to tweak it just the way I want. Of course, it the site goes down, I'm on my own. No support team under contract to get it back up and running... SAAS is appealing. It lifts a great burden from folks like me trying to bridge a gap between the technology and the (often nontechnical) users. I think the greatest barrier to wider acceptance is the up-front costs. Most SAAS providers charge a moderate fee to import data and to set up templates. I find the monthly fees among privides to be comprable. I don't get why companies don't offer some default templates with no setup cost and let customers grow into more custom solutions. I signed up with CCB largely due to the favorable regard it recieved here. We used it for one year, but decided to go another way. My take on CCB is they are focused on the membership and database side, and the Web site side gets less attention. That was a poor fit for us, because we wanted to start with a good web site tool and then grow into other features. Also, their “upgrades” were not optional and dragged us down some paths we didn’t want to go, like fixed-width templates, RSS in my menu, and so on. The final straw was an upgrade where they decided to simplify the article publishing model by eliminating the “draft” category from the publishing scheme. They didn’t notify us of this beforehand. So after the upgrade, all my draft (incomplete, test, private) articles were published!

We’re now using Joomla as our site CMS. It was quite a learning curve for me, but now I have all the control I sought with CCB and never found, plus a great deal of power from the robust third-party extensions community.

I don’t have everything in place as I want just yet, but I have many more options now.

Granted, I’m probably not typical. I have a technical background, and am familiar with programming. I spent the last few days hacking the open source code on my site to tweak it just the way I want.

Of course, it the site goes down, I’m on my own. No support team under contract to get it back up and running…

SAAS is appealing. It lifts a great burden from folks like me trying to bridge a gap between the technology and the (often nontechnical) users. I think the greatest barrier to wider acceptance is the up-front costs. Most SAAS providers charge a moderate fee to import data and to set up templates. I find the monthly fees among privides to be comprable. I don’t get why companies don’t offer some default templates with no setup cost and let customers grow into more custom solutions.

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