OCOSBE

February 3, 2017

New OCOSBE Website Proposal

Below some thoughts and a price quote on the website:

Content

To begin with, we would copy the content of the site to a new format. In other words, the content wouldn’t change but the look, the layout and some of the functionality would change. Of course the site would include all of the evangelists and their current information as well as the blog and all old blog entries. It would also contain social media buttons for ease in sharing the information on each webpage.

I would suggest moving the Officers, Membership Information and Forms under an About Us tab and moving all of the Evangelist categories under a “Find an Evangelist” tab. We would keep the same Evangelist categories and we would add the ability to search the site. The search would pull up evangelists by name and category as well as blog topics and other key words that might describe a ministry such as “clown”, “theology”, “apologetics”, etc. We will also set up the site so that YouTube videos can be used to show the evangelist sharing or to include an introduction message or promo video that will play on their page without the site re-directing to YouTube and without any YouTube commercials.

In time I also think we need to add information to the site to help young or new evangelists – ie., how to know if you’re called to be an evangelist, tips for new evangelists and other information that would be helpful that most of us learned the hard way. I believe that it is very important that new and young evangelists understand the value of membership in OCOSBE and see the site as a resource that would help to connect them with churches.

I think the site also needs a section called “Why Use an Evangelist?” The SBC national “COSBE” organization has a page like this and since I’ve been working with them as well, I’m sure they would be glad to let us either use or adapt their description or we could create our own.

This is an issue that might need to be discussed but I can see how it would be helpful for evangelists to also be able to post items to the site that they are selling to help support their ministries. This would especially help if an evangelist has a CD or a book and someone wants to purchase it after they leave the church. If OCOSBE wants to add this, we will set-up the site so that any evangelist with a PayPal account can create a button (through their own PayPal) and we’ll simply add it to their item so that everything stays secure and the purchase is made outside the site. If a purchase is made, only the evangelist knows because it will only come through his PayPal account and he would set-up shipping costs and everything else through his own PayPal. The item could be posted both on his OCOSBE webpage as well as inside a site-wide Resource Center.

Furthermore, the Evangelism Department, under Mike Napier, just launched a new website for MostImportantThing.org. This is a site of salvation testimonies–about 3,000 of them at present. I think it would be valuable to add a new Tab to the OCOSBE site which would show the salvation stories of our evangelists (or at least as many as are willing to do it). Since our ministry is managing the MostImportantThing site, we would simply create a page that would have all OCOSBE testimonies on it – either written testimonies or by video or both. Linking the two sites is one of the things that we will be encouraging churches to do as well. I would also like to do this as a way of encouraging the Baptist Messenger to run an article on the new OCOSBE site that would also be promoting the MIT project (as well as EvangelismOK app because we would pull the testimonies into the app too). In other words, I believe this is a good way to help draw state attention to our evangelists by creating links between the new OCOSBE site and other on-going BGCO projects.

We will build the site on a wordpress platform for the ease of whoever might need to make changes on it (i.e., upload new blogs, add new members, etc.), we will teach whoever will be managing the site what they need to know and will continue to be on hand to help as needed.

Cost

As far as cost, I know that budget is a huge factor. I wish we could give this to you for free but we’ve cut back the price as much as we can. We would charge a one-time set-up fee of $250 (this cost also includes a wordpress theme that our ministry would purchase to use as the platform for the site) and $300 per year. For organizations we normally charge a larger set-up fee and $35/month.

Also, I’m not sure who you pay for the domain but we would check and see if we could save you any money on it. If not, then I would suggest keeping it registered where it currently is.

Samples

Here are some sample sites that use the same theme we would use on the new OCOSBE site:

Let me know what you think. I’m sure we’ll have more thoughts and tweaks as we move forward but I think this is a good place to begin.

Questions?

Contact Kolby King at: kolbyking@threethirtyministries.org