AmentCreative LLC

A friend of mine gave me the link to a church website that had been redesigned after their previous $20,000 website was reclaimed by the designer.  I guess they didn't read the contract. Anyway, the website (using a pdf document... hahaha.  Web designer humor) taught churches how to build a website for under $100. I really had to laugh. First of all, it is possible to do.  Second, it is not recommended. Here are a few reasons why.  Almost all of them extend from inexperience and this guy is acting like an authority.Why does a cheap website not work:

1. The site that was touting this cheap way to go said to use GoDaddy Economy for hosting.  This is a horrible idea.  First of all, if you are a church it should appall you that GoDaddy uses soft porn for their advertising.  I guess some churches just don't have standards.
2. Economy hosting always means shared hosting.  When I checked the IP address that this church was on I discovered that there were just over 3400 other sites sharing it!  That means that there are 3400 sites all competing to use that one portal.  That's bad.  I personally will put no more than 50 on one IP.  You can see how this hurts performance.
3.  The last thing that he recommends is to have a college student build the site for you.  If you read my previous posts, you know I think this is a bad idea.  College students leave and go to school.  That leaves you with a site that was built by someone else.  It's difficult to sort through someone else's work.  Most of my clients are people who had sites built by a well meaning college student and need to have the code updated only to find out that it's much more difficult than they can handle.  Where is their college student when they need him?
4. Another thing that this site has problems with, that only comes from inexperience.  Spam portals.  I have found (and I don't even think like a spammer) at least 3 ways to hijack the site and spam people.  That's what happens when you do it yourself though.  All I have to say is that I hope the pastor likes viagra and girls from the Ukraine, because once they find his site, they will hijack it.  Rookies.
5. One last thing.  The church uses a .cc domain name.  That is a domain name extension for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. That's near Australia for those of you Geography buffs.  That means that when search engines look at this domain, their first inclination is to categorize it for another country.  
6. This is the last, last point before the next one.  This is the link for the "about us" page: http://www.theirbrokenchurchsite.cc/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100&Itemid=54  (I changed the name of the domain to save them embarassment).Even anew person to the industry can change the url to http://www.theirbrokenchurchsite.cc/about-us.  But I guess they like being cheap instead of easy to link to.
7. OK last point really... When I did a search for their church's name, they actually came up 2nd in google.  Not too bad if you ask me!  BUT read the description for their church website.  "Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system"  HAHAHAHAHA!!!!  Is this a church or an advertisement for Joomla?  And the favicon in the address bar is also a Joomla Icon.  Noobs.

 I know you've been burned because you didn't read a contract and now you are reacting to that, but you could use some professional help. Call me.  Look, you can do it cheap.  And more power to you if you know what you are doing, but the internet is a playground for people who hijack church websites... and you don't.