Blog

November 01, 2019

OCS 3.0 Website Builder Now Officially in Beta Testing

It's time for your help beta testing Website Builder 3.0! Look for an email and a notification on your OCS Dashboard with instructions on accessing the beta version.

Today we move the files from our test server onto our production server and release beta accounts to OCS account holders a few at a time. Testing and development will continue as we include more accounts so we can, with your help, adjust and improve our new website builder quickly, adding more beta testers as needed. 

Next week, everyone can look for a new tab on the top left of your dashboard with 3.0 availability of various tools and current 3.0 progress of our other tools. While it has been a lot of work to get to this point, the 3.0 base is in place that should allow us to continue to release all new 3.0 versions of each tool faster in the coming weeks and months. 

October 29, 2019

October 2019 Newsletter

Find out more about the OCS 3.0 Rollouts and our Spam Form Filter in our October newsletter.

October 24, 2019

OCS 3.0 Rollout: Voice Broadcasting

Notifying your church members about an unexpected weather cancellation just got even easier! Next week we will rollout our updated Voice Broadcasting Tool 3.0 (previously called Automated Voice Messaging). Beginning next Friday you can record and send a voice message right from your phone to those members who wish to only receive phone call notifications.

Dial our new voice broadcast number; the menu will guide you through recording your message and selecting the group to receive it. The previous Text-to-Speech option will remain if you prefer not to record your voice.

As we begin next week the beta release of our new Website Builder 3.0, look on your dashboard for more setup information for Voice Broadcasting 3.0.

October 17, 2019

Forms Upgrade: New Form Spam Filters

When people contact you through a form on your website means spam sometimes makes it through. Our original form filter kept spambots from automatically sending spam, but real people have recently been overriding it to send their spam.

So this last week we programmed our very own Form Spam Filtering software and have it now installed on every OCS account. Since activating it, we've seen it catch 85% of spam without one false positive. Every form submission you receive now has a link to report it as spam so we can improve our filters to reduce the spam that makes it through. With the spambot filter still in place, your form submissions should be much more accurate.

October 10, 2019

OCS 3.0 Website Builder Heads to Beta Testing Soon!

Rollouts for the beta testing of our 3.0 Website Builder will begin before the end of October! Four years after upgrading Website Builder to 2.0, this release is the biggest since our initial launch over 7 years ago and marks the first complete rebuild of our Website Builder. This was a huge undertaking: 20 months in the making and still finalizing for official launch in early 2020. Just for this project we even brought on an additional programmer plus a graphic designer to make this a contemporary, robust, and competitive website builder—our best yet.

We give you the power to build a modern website that you can easily customize with image or video backgrounds in each section of a page, with animated loading effects on page scrolling, and even stronger CSS controls for site and individual pages (such as Youth Ministry). Every page built will now be fully responsive yet still allows control of content between desktop and mobile devices. Section Scheduling (such as the announcement of Christmas service times), WYSIWYG Editing, predefined click to Add Block Sections, and easier Drag and Drop section arranging are just a few of the major changes you'll see in our new software, which will have a new look when you log in to build or edit your site.

Not only are the tools new, the structures we used to build the software are completely new so they will allow future tools and improvements to be added quickly. Keep a watch out for more announcements (such as how to participate in the beta testing) on your OCS Dashboard by the end of the month. 

September 12, 2019

Closed for Fall Break 2019

It's time for our Fall Break, so we'll be closed Monday, September 16 through Friday, September 20. While we'll still be notified of server emergencies, any other questions will be answered when we reopen on Monday, September 23.

August 30, 2019

Closed for Labor Day 2019

We will be closed on Monday, September 2 in honor of Labor Day.

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