5 Reasons to Choose WordPress to Run Your Church Website
ByIn the last post I gave you a quick introduction to WordPress. In this post, I’d like to give you some reasons why I choose to use WordPress as a content management system for small- to medium-sized churches.
Here they are:
1. It’s a free content management system – Although it’s built to be a blogging platform, it has a lot of function and flexibility to also be used as a content management system with the right tweaks. That is absolutely free to use.
2. It’s easy to use – Blogging platforms are built to be easy to use. WordPress is used by thousands and thousands of bloggers across the globe and has benefited from their insights to make it better and better. So adding new website pages is super easy. I put it this way … if you can use Microsoft Word with relative ease, you can use WordPress.
3. The search engine love it – Google and the other search engines love WordPress – meaning they get “indexed” quicker and better. And with special bells and whistles (called plugins), they’ll love your site even more … giving you and your church website better exposure in search engine rankings.
4. There are thousands of free templates available – I don’t like to recreate the wheel if there’s a good wheel available that’s also FREE. Check out the WordPress Theme Viewer here to see all the current free themes being offered by designers all over the world. And new themes are being designed and added almost daily. [By the way, templates are called “themes” in WordPress-speak.]
5. You’re in control of it – WordPress is installed on your website hosting account, meaning you control it. And because it’s free (called “open source”), all you have to pay for is your website hosting account.
TAKE A TEST DRIVE: The best way to see how WordPress works is to get a free account at WordPress.com. Althought there’s minor differences to the free version, but it’s basically the same. So go get a free account and take it for a test drive.
LOVE this whole topic, Cory!
I’ve been tinkering around with WordPress, and the one place where I’m having a bit of trouble is with integrating a calendar. I’ve been playing around with Google Calendar, but I’m unable to find a satisfactory way to display calendar events in the sidebar using widgets (let’s say, for the sake of discussion, in list format with date and title for the next 7 days) in a satisfactory manner. I’ve tried RSS feeds, but they don’t display the date, just the title.
Any ideas on what might work?
What would you say that WP has over a open source content management system? Is it as easy to have many administrative users who each have permissions on only particular sections of the site? I’ve had a lot of luck with CMS Made Simple incidently.
I certainly see the advantage of hosting your own over having a provider like E-zekiel when there is so many other hosting providers out there who offer more services for a better price.
Nathan, I’ll admit my shameless bias: I use WordPress, love it, and when people ask me questions … I want to tell them what I like and why I like it and be able to help them.
I can’t speak for other CMS’s out there … but WP is simple … it’s meant to do a couple of things really well.
It’s free, got lots of tech support, free and rockin’ themes … etc.
One more thing .. I really tell people this is a small church option … not for everyone.
Of course, there are in existence guys like you who are “tech geniuses” and are in churches and eager and ready to help.
[Note: Nathan and I were in the same Sunday School class together, so I know he's actually a living, breathing Tech Genius!]
The problem with many CMS solutions is that they they’re built to support all sorts of different situations and that is often to the detriment of them all
. I think I’m going to look a bit further into WP in leu of a CMS for smaller sites. I’m interested to see how it works as a CMS vs. a blogging platform.
Nathan, it’s incredibly powerful … and I’ve of course fallen in love with it.
I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts, bro!
We switched our church website to WordPress about a year ago. It has made the management of our content much easier. It’s great to read of some of the plugins here too (such as the events calender and podcast plugins) – will have to try them out. We use pages for all our content (and use the static page plugin, but this is now a feature in v2.1) and posts for news and other things that change. Our design could use a bit of a refresh, but the functionality is working well for us. http://www.lifeswitch.net.nz
I discovered WordPress a little while ago. I’ve been helping churches get online with WordPress and have developed a few themes.
You cite good reasons for choosing WordPress, but they are technical reasons. I think the biggest benefits lie in the way the tool encourages a living window into the church. The blogging concept encourages the church’s ongoing story to be told. The church looks alive.
It also frees the church website from the grip of the geeks. You don’t need to know HTML, CSS or any of that stuff to maintain your church web site.
Ah, I decided to use WordPress for my church’s website before reading this. Seemed like the perfect solution.
I’ve played around with Drupal and Joomla and our church site was on Drupal wehn I took over running it.
I have also been building and running sites on WordPress for a few years now and I have to say i have founf wordpress to be the simplest to use.
If you want to run media rich websites with a magazine layout then it can perform BUT!!!! If you already use a diffrent CMS then it may be easier for you to stick with it.
I am not a programer but its the fact that I have been using wordpress for a few years that has allowed me to become familiar with what goes where and what does what. Having said that, WordPress is so easy to use, and the community behind it so vast that i believe anyone could switch over quite easily.
I’m currently still building out church website on my own server (until its finished) I’m using the Revolution 2 Church theme as a base and I’m really happy with it so far: http://oaktree.irishmark.net
I use WP for my own blog and my husband and I are for sure going to use it for our church’s blog which we should be getting online anyday now… sheesh, yeah right… anyway *Beth shakes head* husabnd adapted an existing WP theme for my blog… but my one complaint with WP is the tags… I love live writer… our daughter blogs and live writer is the only way she can do it easily.. but we cant add tags… I found a plugin which lets me add tags to the post itslef but they arent added to the tag cloud in the sidebar… do you have an answer? I hope i pray… i unspirituality cross my fingers …
I thought i should update the comment above and say that the site has been live for about 10 months now and worpdress has proven to be brilliant at handling everything we, as a church, throw at it.
http://www.oaktree.org.uk (btw)