Has anyone used Elexio?

[Tom Kirk]

At Elexio, we separate the design portion of the site from the content portion of the site. With all of our sites, you will have total control over your content. That's what a Content Management System is all about. If you know HTML code - it's only one click away, and you can access the code for each page and work with it.

The design is separate. You will either use our Dynamic Canvas designs or we will create a custom design. Custom design can also include a solution where you create the design yourself, and we do the coding of the design to make it work with our CMS.

In the design portion of the site (not the content portion), you will have control over all Flash areas (slide shows etc.) and all Channel areas (custom portions that can be text, HTML, RSS feeds, or draw information from the database of the site like upcoming events, press releases or recently modified pages etc.) With our Dynamic Canvas designs, you may also control portions of the header with organization name and logo.

For those that want additional control of the design, we offer an option of Advanced Design Control which will allow a user to actually control the CSS of the site.

I hope that helps!

[stjamesame]

i've called customer support and i've also submitted incident reports online. we just completed our redesign with elexio and everyone loves it. please note some of the designs that you see are basic designs that churches have added extra html coding to. i learned this while working on the redesign because i'd request something from a different site and the designer would look at it and say "they added that html code."

the beauty of elexio is that i can have content managers (page editors) who update their own pages whenever they feel like it and once i review their changes i can approve or decline their edits and changes.

i would suggest that any one considering elexio simply give them a call because they are adding features and lowering prices daily.

[Pastor Ryan]

I strongly recommend Faithconnector.com

They are great!

So far 8 months, 0 down time and fast customer support service through e-mail and phone conversation.

They are awesome, great templates as well as prices for Custom design.

Our site is ButterfieldAG.com

I have not had 1 problem with this company.

Every now and then their responses may come off a bit snooty, but they always have the right answer. I am sure it must get old responding to the FAQs of idiots like me, but they do good.

[Pastor Ryan]

also we are of a church of roughly 900-1000 depending on the month, the monthly cost of their service equates to about $0.06 per month per person for our site.

Online E-Forms are a life saver as well!

[Pastor Ryan]

I do not care for Elexio's service.

[Tom Kirk]

Hi Ryan,

FaithConnector is a good company.

We at Elexio are far from perfect, but when I look over all of our electronic records (we track everything), I'm a little confused by your response saying you don't care for Elexio's service. But - that's what Forums are for - so people can post their thoughts, comments and suggestions. We welcome them!

I'm sorry we were not able to satisfy your needs, and I am glad you are enjoying your website and experience with FaithConnector. There are more than enough website companies to go around for all the churches that need websites. God bless you.

Tom Kirk - Sales Director for Elexio

[Pastor Ryan]

I agree that you guys are a faith based company that cares about your customers. I just didn't get the service I needed while our church was with you.

You guys were well spoken, however, the representative that we had was less than cordial with me on certain situations, especially when I expressed that I was considering looking for alternative services.

I am glad you guys have a good record.

Blessings.

[stjamesame]

if anyone would like to our new elexio design just check our stjamesame.org half of the site is custom design and the other half is code. i like the fact that i can have content editors so i'm not trying to update pages for every ministry. they can edit their own pages and when i log on it can see the edit and then i have the option of approving the edits. it works very well for large churches.

as for the customer service, i ran into a problem recently but then i just email tom and he handled the situation. i know it sounds like i'm being paid to make all the nice comments about elexio but i'm not.....i'm just one very satisfied customer.

[Pastor Ryan]

that is great, that is how I am with Faith connector, I promote the heck out of them.

You find someone you like and you praise them and stick with them.

I may have been wrong to criticize Faith Connector publicly, it was just how I felt and didn't want another ministry to go through what I did, however it seems like their are several satisfied customers.

to each their own.

[Pastor Ryan]

wanted to correct myself on this pot that I meant be critical of Elexio, I have no complaints about Faith Connector at all.

[bgates]

Best - tutorials for beginning users, Elixio really bent over backwards to make their video tutorials
Best - CMS - content management system

Great templates to start from.
Good price on web hosting.
Have not run into any software bugs.

No real experience with support issues yet since we're just starting with them.

I'm not happy that Elixio's calendaring system can't import well-known and widely accepted standard calendar formats. There's no good reason for not being able to import from or sync with a remote calendar. They can export, but not import AFAIK.

This is a curious omission in their rich feature set especially now that they're marketing a church management system - which I'm guessing can exchange data with their web site templates on some level. If the calendar import feature is not available, I believe it is a deliberate choice to exclude it.

One of our design goals for our web site was to have data entry once. Redundant entry is a waste of time and invites errors and omissions. With connectivity and formatting standards available today, there's no reason to leave such an important feature out. If data (calendar events) is keyed into a church office calendar, there should be a way to import that data into the online calendar. There's no reason why we should have to key in the same data twice.


There's plenty of info on the net about calendar data interchange formats.
There's iCalendar which is supported by the following companies/applications:
Google Calendar, Facebook, MS Outlook, TYPO3, Mozilla, Evolution, Yahoo, MS Exchange, Apple iCal, Lotus, Novell, ...

[bgates]

Another thing Elixio doesn't offer ...

In this case, I can cut them some slack since this would be hard and they might not know how to do it.

... they don't offer a web services API to program against. If that was available, I could create seamless integration between -any- church office database and the Elixio site.