Blogging your Church
Using Wordpress to set up a Church website
If you haven't yet set up a Church website or maybe you have one but somebody set it up ages ago and now it's dated and could do with a fresh look, then using a blog such as Wordpress may be a solution.
Blogs are a great way to communicate as you can share news about what's happening both in your church and in the wider communit.
Wordpress is a free blogging software package. You can set up a blog for free using the ready installed version at Wordpress.com.
Video Tutorials
Follow our video tutorials to take you through the steps to:
- First Steps - Signing up for your blog
- Adding in your first post
- Changing the appearance of your website
- Adding in a custom header & altering the tag line
Some examples of church websites that use wordpress are:
Darling Street Methodist Church, Enniskillen
Christ Church, Shannon, Co Clare
Advantages of Using Wordpress
- It's free
- You can store up to 3Gb of images, Word and PowerPoint and Adobe pdf documents
- You don't need a vast amount of technical expertise and no specialist software is required to set it up
- It's easy to update once you know how
- You can think through what the basic information you need for your website
- You can embed videos from You-tube and Vimeo etc easily
- You can embed your church location using the Irish Methodist Google Map page
- You can link to photo sharing websites such as Flickr
- You can give your website interactivity by allowing readers to comment
- Your website appears more interesting because you build up a sense of sharing its story over time by adding posts about what is happening or sharing resources
- You can set up ‘static' web pages such as an About page, Contact Us and a page for various groups within the church
- You can choose from a variety of themes (100) and customise the appearance slightly
Disadvantages of Using Wordpress
- You'll end up with a web address with the form of yourchurchname.wordpress.com – although the next option is to but your own webdomain name and set it to forward to your blog
- You can't upload videos or audio files such as mp3s of your own unless you pay for an upgrade
- It doesn't work well for a very large website
- You can't control how the overall appearance looks and your website will look similar to others since the themes will be used widely
Installing Wordpress on your own server
The next option is to install the free version of Wordpress from wordpress.org. The advantage of this is that you can upload various free plugins which can be used for example to set up a gallery of photos or a calendar of events. You will also simplify your web address so that it can take the format of – www.yourchurchname.org
You will need to pay for your web host for this service and you'll need to ensure that they have PHP5 and MySQL so they can run Wordpress. You'll need more technical expertise for this, although some webhosts offer a Wordpress ready option.
An example which has used Wordpress to build their church website but which has it's own web host is Whiteabbey Methodist Church.
Follow our video tutorials to take you through the steps to:
First Steps - Signing up for your blog
Changing the appearance of your website
Adding in a custom header & altering the tag line
