What We Do

Does your shul desperately need a website? Does it have a website that hasn't been updated in the past five years? Do you need a nice, simple interface for putting up new information? Have you dreamed about having membership forms online?

If so, we're here to help. We've worked with numerous Jewish organizations on getting them set up with websites. We make the process straight-forward and hassle-free. We can handle the design, coding, backend and hosting of your site. All you have to do is log into our simple admin interface and put up your individual information.

What Makes Us Different

So why is our service different than others? Here's just a few of the reasons:

Specialization: We specialize in Jewish organizations. You won't need to explain to us how a Jewish calendar works; we automatically put every single Jewish holiday of the year on your site. We also have candle lighting times, and support Hebrew text easily.
Clean Design: Have you ever gone onto a shul website to find davening times, and had to go through ten links and open up a PDF to find it? We don't like that. Every page is served straight to your web browser, and 99% of content on your site will be available in under 3 clicks.
Speed: We use an incredibly fast system for rendering our pages on the server, and since all of our HTML is hand written, it downloads quickly even over the slowest connections. Also, we minimize use of Javascript to where it's useful so your browser can easily display the page.
Supports All Browsers: We develop all sites to work equally well on Windows, Mac, and even Linux, and test our sites in a wide variety of web browsers. No more "Best viewed in Internet Explorer"; Firefox, Safari and Opera are welcome.
Security: We don't base our product off of large, bug-ridden frameworks. The vast majority of security issues can be attributed to bugs in such packages as PHP, or simply programmers not knowing how to avoiding the most common types of flaws. We have ten years worth of web experience, and we know what to look out for.

Online Event Management

The most important thing a website can do for you is get information out there. The most important tool for this will be the event manager. You simply enter the date, time and additional information into our Word-like, online editor and it automatically shows up on your calendar and in newsletters. No need to distribute the information manually to all the different locations: let the computer handle it for you!

Calendar

How many times have you seen a site come with a built-in Hebrew calendar? Just give us your longitude and latitude, and your site will automatically have all candle lighting times for the year filled in. It will list important upcoming holidays as well. The calendar is also fully integrated with the event manager, so the calendar will be the one-stop location for all information.

You can also add annual events to the calendar, either from the English or the Hebrew date. This is perfect for yarzheits and birthdays.

Shiurim

We fully support both text shiurim and audio shiurim. Audio shiurim are offered both for streaming (listening from the web browser) and downloading. This gives your guests both the ease of one-click listening and the flexibility to take the shiur to go.

Forms

You can also use your site to collect information from users. Simply specify what type of information you're trying to collect, and the form is automatically generated. When someone fills out the form, you receive an e-mail to let you know. All information is stored online, so there's no chance of losing an important submissions.

Pricing

We strive to make the entire process of getting your site up and running as simple as possible. That includes pricing. The only amounts you will be charged are listed here. Any other costs required to get your site up (such as hosting fees or domain name registration) will be covered by the stated price as necesary.

We basically break down all charges into three categories: setup fees, monthly maintenance fees, and special service fees.

Setup Fees

We incur a number of costs when initially setting up your site, as well as a large investment of time. Therefore we charge a $100 setup fee to get you started with a website. As a special incentive, we will refund this fee if you maintain your account with us for 12 months.

Maintenance Fees

We provide to levels of service on our sites: self service and full service. With self service sites, you will be responsible for putting content on your site (like upcoming events) using our easy-to-use administrative interface. With full service, you would e-mail us the information you want updated, and we do so for you.

Self-service site cost $100 a month. This covers the costs of hosting, database backups, technical oversite, and general updates. The full service package is $200 a month.

For both packages, we always provide quick responses to any bugs or security vulnerabilities noticed. With the self-service package, we provide limited technical support for learning the administrative interface. However, it will not provide a constant walk-through on managing your site: for that, you must either purchase full service, or consider a special training service (mentioned below).

Special Services

Sometimes you need something a bit out of the box. The most common example is a custom site design. While we provide a number of professional designs out of the box from which to select, sometimes you'll just want something more specific for your shul. The pricing for such a project is not strict, but here is a basic idea:

If you want a new design from scratch, a probable price range is $500 to $1000 dollars, depending upon complexity. If you have an existing site design that you would like to use, we would have to convert it to the shulhomepage template format. That would usually cost around $300. You can also hire an outside designer to produce a template.

Another possible special service would be custom features on the site. Who knows: maybe you want a news feed from JPost? Whatever it may be, we will charge in accordance with the complexity of the project. Sometimes, if we feel a feature is of general interest to most people, we'll do it free of charge. In other words, if you have an idea, don't hesitate to mention it.

A final service is training. If you would like us to send someone to explain how to make updates or give a better idea of how to format things for the web (remember, 8.5x11 fliers are not good webpages!), we can do so for an hourly fee. Please contact us if you are interested.

Demo Site

The demo site allows you to experience and interact with a site fully run by the custom ShulHomepage software. It is hosted at http://demo.shulhomepage.com/. It provides full access to the administrative interface so you can test out making changes to the site exactly as you would with a real site.

Contact Us

If you'd like more information, you can send an e-mail and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.