Our church is looking for a simple way to put up a website... we tried it a few years ago with static HTML pages that I designed through Netscape Composer and it didn't quite work out. I want to find a simple program or provider that will let someone go in and add information easily ... but all of the CMS programs are too complicated to set up and the "Church web hosting" providers are expensive and cut off important features.

What simple (and cheap) solution is there for a small church?

Thanks so much!

If you have access to a MAC you might want to look at .mac and iweb. I got sick of all the stuff that goes along with a "real" website and just reduced it down to this. No hasstles...easy to update, and maintain. Of course I lose things like rollovers and custom scripting, but the response to how nice the site is has made the staff forget about that stuff. We are always getting email and visitor comments on how much they like out site.

You could try a program like Adobe DreamWeaver or Microsoft Expression Web.

More experienced site developers will argue that these tools don't always generate great code, and they are a bit expensive. However, if you want to get a website up quickly, these will get you started.

Make sure that you check your code with the W3C HTMLValidator .

If you write good, standards-compliant code (using HTML + CSS) and avoid cute Microsoft-only technologies, your site will work well on any server and on any browser.

Blogger, Wordpress or Google Page Creator are good, free options.

you might also check with DanRoth on Drupal.
I use frontpage (or expressions) but Dan is the Drupal King. I believe that Drupal is probably what you're looking for.

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I second the Wordpress or Blogger solution.

You do not have to spend much money to get a very slick, EASY website for your church. A 12 month economy hosting package on GoDaddy.com is $43/year. A domain name is $8/year. Wordpress is free. For $51/year you could have a professional looking site.

While wordpress is a blog platform, your site does not have to look like a blog. Once it is set up, adding content is as easy as using MS Word.

Take advantage of the free services offered on the new now that are not only cheaper than paid versions, but better! Try Google Calendars for your church calendar, Flickr for your photo albums.

We're using WordPress (well, I'm using it) at http://www.elmdon-parish.org.uk/ and have found it really suits our needs.

I'm deliberately keeping as much stuff as possible in the "blog" side of the site, and relatively little static-type content ("pages" in WordPress speak). One big, big advantage of the blog-as-church-web-site approach is that stuff just falls off the bottom of the home page all by itself once it gets old and irrelevant .

I took a reasonable-looking free theme ("See you at the beach") and added our own image. I confess that I did end up writing one plugin of my own to get the events calendar working how I wanted. Various other wonderful plugins (11 in total - yikes!) added into the mix.

Some excellent resources for churches using WordPress - advice, themes, plugins etc. - at Living Open Source.

Best wishes,

Richard

(not to change the subject) I like the calendar wiget. There is another way to do it now ising the Google calendar feed and feedburner. Here is a post about it that uses one of my sites as an example:
http://newwebministry.com/2007/07/31...nd-feedburner/

Interesting - will have a look, thanks. A useful RSS feed from our Google calendar is one of my "things to look into".

Best wishes,

Richard

Thanks guys for the replies. We're really going to start thinking and talking about a website here soon ... I'm leaning towards Drupal or something else that is database driven. I'm really excited about this!!

Thanks again!

We're using Drupal for our website (www.nbc.org) and it took a little time to get it put together but another one that we looked at and liked (it had a lot more templates to use but we wanted the extra versatility that Drupal had) is Joomla. For simple, DH (the webmaster and software engineer) said that Joomla is a great resource. Check it out!

Ann

Just a word to the wise... most of the software mentioned here is either freeware or has a trial edition. TRY THEM OUT! See what you work best with and pick that one. Just because I (or anyone else for that matter) prefers a specific program doesn't mean it's the best for you. There is a reason there are so many different programs.

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