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Catholic Web Sites - FREE

Ecclesia Web Service, a division of the Saint Ambrose Foundation offers free web sites to official Catholic organizations anywhere in the world. We do not profit from this or advertise on your sites.

Ecclesia Web Service is funded by The Saint Ambrose Foundation and your donations. We are devoted to providing quality web sites to Catholic Parish's and Organizations for promoting Catholic research, information, & networking on the internet.

HOW DO I / WE GET A FREE WEB SITE?

    We have only one requirement, and that is that we receive a written letter from your pastor, provincial, or local ordinary giving permission. This MUST be from a priest or religious official, NO EXCEPTIONS. We feel it is their responsibility to

• Know about the site and
• Be responsible for its content

The letter MUST include:

• Desired Domain (Directory) Name
• Contact Name and authorized email address
• Official Letterhead and seal
• Signature of Priest, Provincial, or local Ordinary

St Ambrose Foundation
c/o Scott Fabian
4430 Woodside Dr
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301
USA

You may expedite your request by also sending a scanned copy of your signed letter to us at support@catholic-church.org.  (You must still mail the original to the St. Ambrose Foundation.) 

HOW DO WE GET STARTED?

The first step is to determine how you wish to be seen on the web. 

There are two ways to host your web site.  The first and preferred way is for you to register your domain name with any registrar (ie: godaddy.com, networksolutions.com, whois.com, hostingmetro.com, etc) . 

The first method requires that you register a domain name and point it to our DNS servers (See more information below).

This method will also include a FREE domain email system. 

Our hosting service is with HostingMetro.com and they offer domain registration to our clients for only $9.95 per year.  I recommend registering your domain with them so that the domain and FREE hosting services are with the same company.  If you wish to do this, register your domain name by

 CLICKING ON THIS LINK

and be sure to specify that you are joining the catholic-church.org service with domain registration at $9.95 per domian/per year,

Once your domain name has been registered, send an email request to us at support@catholic-church.org notifying that you have registered your domain name.  We will instruct Hosting Metro to point the DNS to our nameservers.  and need your dns to point to us, accordingly.

Once your domain has been registered and is pointing to our systems, we create your web site and provide FTP or SFTP credentials to you. We usually create a simple HOME page to assure that the domain name is pointing to the home page correctly. Once that is ready, you may upload your web pages and pictures immediately.

The second, less preferred way, is to have a domain name created by us at www.catholic-church.org where we add your name to our system (ie: www.catholic-church.org/yourparish . This second method, will limit your ability to do anything more than post simple html pages and images to your site - and does not include email services. For the second method, we set up a directory under http://catholic-church.org/yourparish to which you would have direct access via FTP only. There are no space restrictions, but we do request that you use common sense for file and image sizes.

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If you already have a domain name registered (For existing domain names (ie: http://www.your-organization.org)), you need to set your DNS server or submit a request to your registrar (the company where you registered your domain name) to point the DNS nameservers to:

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ns1.catholic-church.org
ns2.catholic-church.org
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We can help you do this if you do not know how.

Unix/linux is case sensitive, so we recommend your directory name be in all lower case letters. You can have dashes in your name, but no other characters or spaces besides letters and numbers.

How do we get Free Web Site Design Service?

We have a limited number of web site designers who have graciously volunteered their time to create simple, but very professional looking web sites for you at absolutely no charge.  Since their time is on a voluntary basis, requests are processed on a first-come, first-serve basis.  Most requests for web site changes are completed within 72 hours depending on the amount of work required to complete the task.

All requests for changes and the implementation of these changes onto your web site are controlled and approved by your single, designated authorized agent, and catholic-church.org prior to placement on your site. Usually a DEMO page is created on your site, whereby you see the final page before it is moved into PRODUCTION.

For new sites, you will be sent the webmasters email address to establish a direct correspondence, where you will be asked to answer specific questions regarding the purpose and "look" that you desire for your web site.

We are also available to provide web design services to existing hosted sites, so whether you are looking for a new site or just a new look to your existing site, our volunteer web designers are eager to serve.

If you are a Web Designer and would like to volunteer your services to support this cause, please send us an email with examples of "production" web sites that you have developed. 

Please see our FAQ Frequently Asked Questions
or If you have any other questions, please email us.

support@catholic-church.org