Mon 19 Feb 2007
Start or Revamp your Church Website
Posted by Andrew Mitry under Web/Tech
I have gotten a lot of emails recently asking for advice about starting or revamping a website for their church. Most of the inquirers are volunteers and not very technical. I definitely am not a fan of building static HTML websites with FrontPage or DreamWeaver and then uploading to a web host. I find that these sites often become stale once the volunteer developer gets busy. Ideally, the site runs on some sort of easy to use Content Management System. The content management system allows less technical users to post content without too much hassle, keeping the site fresh and up to date.
This is an initial list of sites that I have looked at over the past couple of years, if you have experience with any of these solutions or any other suggestions or ideas, please feel free to comment.
Hosted services that allow users with little technical expertise to get up and running quickly:
Designed for churches:
Ekklesia 360 : Church Content Management System (CMS)
Orthodox Web Solutions
SiteOrganic
Designed for non-profits:
Wild Apricot
General purpose:
Google Apps for Your Domain
Homestead
Content Management Systems that require some technical skill to get up and running:
Designed for churches:
Web-Empowered Church
Blogging Platforms:
Wordpress
Habari
General Purpose:
Joomla
Drupal
Plone
ExpressionEngine
Comparing Open-Source Content Management Systems -Idealware weighs the strengths and weaknesses of Joomla, Drupal, and Plone
At St. Mark’s we are currently using Joomla for most of our sites but we are considering moving to Drupal to take advantage of some of its advanced features.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Hi Andrew,
Have you heard of SilverStripe? It’s a CMS that we’ve been developing over the last year - we’ve given it a much simpler, more intuitive interface than most of the ‘general purpose’ CMSes - while still being flexible enough for most websites.
Site
Demo
February 19th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
Hello Sam,
No I had not heard of SilverStripe until you mentioned it. Definitely looks interesting, I’ll have to try it out.
Thanks!
February 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Hi,
We use Web Hero (webhero.com) for our web site. It’s limited, but so is my time and technical experience. It’s not geared for churches, but is pretty easy to use.
What do you think of it?
Brian
February 20th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Some good information here. The two big names here for web development are Joomla and Drupal. Personally, I run with drupal and there were three big reasons for that.
1) User Access Control. Drupal has an entirely flexible system. I needed this for some of the sites I work on.
2) Customizing the look. I looked at Joomla and Drupal for this and found drupal gave me more options, though they are not always easy to implement.
3) Developing. I am a coder and love to program. Drupal is more well coded (I know this is a matter of opinion) and it is easier to develop additional functionality for.
This is my 2 cents and I definitely respect Joomla. It is powerful and in some areas has a leg up on Drupal.
You may be interested in this image that has a functionality overview of CMSes…
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-osource1/cms_comparison.gif
Also, if you are interested in drupal for churches check out.. http://www.geeksandgod.com. We are doing a series on drupal right now (10 parts) to try to give people an introduction to the major parts.
February 21st, 2007 at 12:37 am
Thanks Matt, the series on Drupal is very helpful.
March 15th, 2007 at 5:59 am
Nice Blog, I’m using toko for content management (it’s a free one)… http://toko-contenteditor.pageil.net