How to (easily) make a better church website
Short answer: Use WordPress (or some other blog software).
Why?
- Easy install and basic setup
- Looks good (use themes if you want something unique)
- Easy editing by anyone with Internet
- Place for static content (e.g. — About your church)
- Place for dynamic content (e.g. — Upcoming events)
- Accessible
- RSS
- Many other reasons
[note: this is not a new idea]
Case Study: CCCI Youth Group
On our page we stripped the sidebar into just the basics and limited the front page to one post (or you could make a page your front page). In addition, we use the following plug-ins:
- Democracy for the poll
- FAlbum for the photo album (it integrates with our Flickr account)
- Event Calendar for the, uh, event calendar
- PXS Mail Form for contacting us
- runPHP to add some PHP code so that only certain categories would display on some of our pages
A final resource: From Weblog to CMS with WordPress
[update: there was an issue with the events not displaying properly using Event Calendar; i applied the second commenting-out found here and all seems to be working again. in addition, i have taken out the "limit the front page to one post" hack since we only have two categories (news and events ... and events are not shown due to the Event Calendar plugin) and one can limit the number of posts from within the Dashboard]
[July 2007 update: even easier to make a static front page now with WP]
