This week we will begin the task of creating a website for Oakway Wesleyan Church. Since I am most familiar with WordPress as a publishing platform we will be using it to build our site. Tony Morgan had a great post on this a few years back. My question is this: What’s the most important thing about a church website? I would say the number 1 priority will be keeping it updated. I will be training others to do the basic tasks to accomplish that. I don’t think it matters how flashy or fancy your church website is if the information is outdated. I have personally been guilty of this with youth websites and the like. Ease of use and up to date information are a must for our site. Above that, what should our focus be? I really like what FWC/ALIVE has done with their website to help people build connections. Should we podcast ASAP or should that be a later priority? What wordpress themes have you seen/used that look/work great for churches? I would love your thoughts on this. Is wordpress the wrong way to go? What are you using with your church?
Heath – you have lots of options for building a church website and WordPress is certainly a good choice for a lot of churches. The best way to determine which platform is best for you is to have a clear vision of the content that will be placed on the site now, and in the future. You’ll also need to base your choice on the people that will maintain the site – having familiarity with a product can definitely ease your startup and any challenges you meet along the way.
There is an excellent article at Godbit about the main types of sites and we just did a survey of the top CMS choices for churches on our site.
Blessings on your new venture!
GG’s website is built with WordPress. There are pros and cons to using it though. It takes a while to tinker with a theme’s coding to get it personal to you & your church (when not done well, it’s obvious that you’re using a wordpress generic theme).
Making a “landing page” that isn’t the Blogroll presents a few challenges.
Occasionally, posts’ & pages’ formatting can be frustrating. Trying to properly center a picture can be next to impossible (even when using html editing).
On the pros side, it is great to be able to install a user permissions plug-in and set up accounts for multiple people to be able to work on their areas of the site (ie, giving your SS class teachers the ability to edit their class’ page, getting others to help keep fresh news/pictures up, etc.).
Also, keeping it clean and simple can be tough with wordpress with all the sidebar, commenting, headers & footers text, etc. But it can be done with work.