Installing WordPress on Your Church Website
ByContinuining in the Using WordPress for Church Websites series, let’s talk quickly about installing WordPress on your church website.
Because WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms out there today, most website hosting plans offer a “one-click install” of it. (I do with my hosting services.)
If you know what you’re doing … you can do it yourself with the WordPress “Famous 5-Minute Install” tutorial post here.
I’m a little out of my league when discussing purely technical details of the install … all of that is available on the WordPress site in their basic requirements anyway.
What I do know is that, you’ll need a Linux hosting plan to use it on your website, that offers MySQL databases.
With WordPress, your content (i.e. text) is stored in a database (MySQL). When someone surfs to your page, the database is queried … and a web page is then output to your guest’s browser. WordPress in essence builds that page based on your template files (called themes).
These are just some basics of installing WordPress that I thought I’d throw out there.
***
My Linux hosting plans support all this, including one-click install of WordPress. As always I’m happy to help you walk through installation of it if you’re using my hosting services. 
Just email me with questions …
I am presently developing my web page for my school web site using Wordpress. At our church, we are looking for a web builder program that works easily for us, and after having time to work with wordpress, I believe it would be a perfect fit for our church. I am concerned I don’t know enough about the Linux system you mentioned. What can I do to learn more about this program and make this possible? I will be meeting with our church secretary in the next 2 weeks and would like to share Wordpress with her. We need a free web site to work from and one that is easy to access and adapt to. I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.
Anica Brown
Anica,
I don’t know anything about Linux (I am sure you can find this out researching on Google) but that really shouldn’t be a concern.
If you choose a host like HostGator who already has WordPress capabilities, then you could easily purchase a theme and load it. I would also consider Doreo: http://doreo.com/premium_wordpress_hosting/church.
Other than that, I would use tutorials on iThemes.com or WordPress.tv to learn how to use and adapt the themes.
Hope this helps you out.