March 14, 2019

Seven Years in Business

This Sunday, March 17, we will complete our seventh year in business. Alisha recently took a digital trip down memory lane and looked at the first iteration of our OCS Website, what you would have viewed seven years ago. Boy, have we come a long, long way!

While you can read on our site a brief synopsis of our business, we thought we'd give a little more background on how we got here. Online Church Solutions (OCS) was an idea Mark had while in Ireland almost a year prior to launch—though we didn't know at the time when that launch would happen—and he even came up with the name. We had built many church and ministry websites for free throughout Ireland during our 4.5 missionary years, work that was a starting point for understanding what churches wanted. We got to watch in real time how their staff and volunteers would create, use, and update their ministry websites.

Launched as website builder with two website templates, OCS included a couple of Tools and optional Podcasting (Did you know we started in 2005 hosting stand-alone sermon podcasts as Podcast Your Sermons?). Very shortly after launch came:

• Two more website templates
• Group Texting
• A Giving Option
• and later on, Email Newsletter

When we launched we had plans for a Membership Database and a couple of other tools, but that was it. We hadn’t even heard of "ChMS" or Church Managment Software. Now we offer 18 tools including the Website Builder, with just a few more to come. 

This means we're starting our eighth business year and excited to share this year what we've built in the new OCS 3.0. We're looking forward to God's blessing of many more years in business and are so thankful to be working with our clients in ministry.