Some churches are using Blog software, such as Wordpress.com, to create their church website. Consider this page you are looking at now here at Sundayresources.net. It has all the ingredients that a modest church website could want.

Wordpress is free from www.wordpress.org   Your internet service provider MOST LIKELY already has it available for installation on your server.  And if it doesn’t, Wordpress is very easy to install.

Wordpress’.com’ is Wordpress’.org’ hosting service. For about $25 a year you can keep your church’s domain name (aka www.firstpresbyterian.org) but continue to build your wordpress blog using their tools and their regularly updated software at wordpress.com.  Really a great idea as they continue to improve their code, options and features.

I like Wordpress’ blog software for a church website OVER Blogger @blogspot.com (from Google) because Wordpress has better text editing tools for your posts, and allows you to create ‘categories’ under which you can group posts. Whereas, Google’s Blogger software at this time is more limited, and only organizes posts by date, -one after the other. So with Wordpress you can create categories to place your posts, such as, “Mission News” and “Music Ministry.”

There are a number of reasons you might want to consider using Blog software to create your site:

1. Blog software easily lets DIFFERENT PEOPLE post content. 
2. People can leave comments at the end of each post!
3. You can choose from many different ready-made layout ‘templates.”  Andwhen you want to give your site a fresh makeover, you just change the template, and your content reformats itself into the template.
4. Blog software has lots of easy-to-add components/widgets that would make your site look cool.
5. You can update the site anytime from any computer.
6. Your site design and content is not at the mercy of one volunteer who might construct html pages in such a way that the next volunteer who comes after them can’t figure out.
7. Pretty much everything you would “NEED” to do at a church website can be done using blog software.
8. They continue to improve blog software…making it more functional and easier to work with.

My guess is that professional church web designers and volunteer web dudes won’t like this idea  ;-)

Two ways to start using blog software…

If you’re already familiar with Wordpress…go ahead and start using that.

If you’re new to blog software, set up a TRIAL site at www.wordpress.com. their templates are really easy to use. AND … you can eventually transfer that site to your church’s domain.