I wanted to outline something that I’ve been working out to serve the many movements around the region that are looking for good quality cost effective solutions for the need for an online presence for their ministries and movements.

Effective immediately, I CruTech will be offering both hosting and basic website design specifically targeted at movements and ministries connected to Cru. This covers metro teams, single-campus missional teams, summer projects and basically anything else that is directly connected to your ministry (anything that would be reimbursable).

As I have wrestled with my costs to provide the hosting as well as costs that I will probably continue to incurr as I investigate tech options related to ministry I have come up with what I see as a fair cost for hosting and design.

Costs

Hosting/year:
$30 (one year minimum)

One-Time Design and Basic Training for Self-Updating:
$30 ($5 for set up, $25 for basic design – see examples below)

Domain Name Registration
$9.95 (This is the exact cost of registering the domain name. You can register it yourself and take care of it yourself if you can find a cheaper place to do it, but I will not be able to manage it for you any cheaper than this.)

I am not available to update your website regularly, if this is absolutely necessary we might be able to work out a payment plan for this.

All costs are per site set up, design and hosting, here are some real-life examples:

• http://www.WesternPACru.com & http://www.PghCru.com would only be charged $30 for hosting per year because the PghCru.com domain merely redirects to WesternPACru.com and does not require extra hosting space or bandwidth.
• http://pitt.WesternPACru.com (no longer exists) is a subdomain of the site and would not incur another Hosting fee, but would require another $5 set up fee (and $25 if it required another design).
• If you have two different websites one for your local movement and one for a summer project, they will require two separate “accounts” and will require separate setup and hosting fees. For example the same local leader who owns http://www.WesternPACru.com leads the Ocean City, MD summer project and owns http://www.OCSummerProject.com and would pay $60 total for the separate websites.

I reserve the right to make exceptions to these rules as necessary, but to be fair to all of the movements that would be interested I will make these very rare and for either very good reason or basic design reasons.

Payment Methods

The only way that I will be able to accept payment is through a staff account transfer. I am not set up for PayPal, check, credit card or any other payment method. I may look into these, but I am not planning on using them any time in the near future.

Design

All designs will be done using WordPress which is an flexible and expandable platform for website creation. I can also do straight HTML design, but make no promises about expandability or ease of updates if we go that way.

Some examples of sites that I have built and currently host:

• CruTech.org (obviously)
• DCCru.com
• WesternPACru.com (& PghCru.com)
• Whelpley.org
• OCSummerProject.com

Signing Up

If you are at all interested in this web-hosting option, please email me at jayson@crutech.org to set it up.

Even we nerds like our time off.

As summer approaches and as the assignments that come with it are soon upon us. I am going to plan on taking a breather on the updates here at CruTech.

I’ll still be posting things occasionally, but only those wonderful gems that I believe you will need to read even between trips to the boardwalk (if you’re on stateside summer project), the privy (if you’re on international summer project) or the library (if you’re doing IBS like me).

I’ll kick this thing back up when August rolls around, though I’m sure the first two weeks thing will steal some of that time too.

Have a wonderful summer!

Over the past few weeks I’ve (with the help of a friend or two) posted about a lot of things that I know about. Now, don’t get worried – I still have plenty of ideas to carry me through. At the same time I want this site to be useful to you, the reader. So, please, take some time and hit the “comments” link and answer a few questions for me:

1. How has the “tech depth” of the posts been so far?
   • Too deep – I don’t get it.
   • Just right – I’m learning how to swim.
   • Too lite – I could have written these.
2. What would you like me to post about in the near future?
3. Is there any other feedback you want to give me?

This week I’m going to take a “week off”. It’s not that there won’t be anything posted this week for you to learn, it’s that it won’t be me writing those posts. I’ve asked Rob Williams (former staff at HQ in Orlando) to share some posts that he wrote a few weeks ago for his own tech blog 170spoons.

In celebration of May 1st, which is both May Day and RSS Awareness Day, they will discuss the nature and advantages of newsfeeds (also known as RSS or “Really Simple Syndication”). Most of you reading this are already taking advantage of a form of RSS Feeds in the email that is sent out when I update the site.

Let me suggest at this point that you go ahead and sign up for a Google/Gmail account as it will help you understand better what he is talking about in the upcoming posts.

See you all again next week!