All Entries in the "Starting a Church Blog" Category

Starting a Church Blog - Part 4

Here on Church Blog we are writing a series of articles to help churches get their web ministries started. These articles attempt to provide information to help the process of starting a church blog a little easier. In this article we will talk about WordPress themes and plugins.

One of the advantages of using WordPress in a self hosted format (this was discussed in a previous article in this Church Blog series) is the availability of wide variety of themes for your site. A WordPress theme is the design of your blog. There are thousands of themes for WordPress, many of them are offered for free. A nice looking theme will have a significant impact on your site. A well designed theme will also make the blogging process a lot smoother. There are also themes available which you can purchase for $50 (fifty) to $250 (two hundred fifty) or more. We have found that the themes from Solostreamhave worked really well for us. The themes from Solostream.com are attractive, easily customized, and very easy to work with. This Christian Blog site is using a theme called WP-Vybe from Solostream. If you want to check out the themes that are offered just click here to view more details.

Once you have a theme in place you can really fine tune your WordPress Church Blog by adding plugins. There are thousands of plugins which are available for WordPress and they are all offered for free. You can find a plugin to do almost anything you can imagine on your blog. We use plugins to provide a verse of the day, backup the site automatically, make it easy and safe for people to contact us, make it easy and safe for people to donate to us, and more. You can check out the plugin directory at WordPress.org to get an idea of the plugins that are available. Installing a good theme and some nice plugins will really make your Church blog pop!

Starting a Church Blog - Part 3

On Church Blog we are writing this series of articles to help churches get there own Church Blog and web ministry developed. We have talked about some of the free options in previous articles, now we are discussing the advantages of using a web host and WordPress for your Church Blog.  WordPress is easy to work with, it is free to use, and there have been hundreds of amazing plug-ins developed to help you really tailor your web ministry. There are also a lot of really amazing themes that have been developed, some free and some for sale, which can help give your Church Blog a unique and professional appearance. We discussed domain names in our last article. In this article we are going to talk about getting a web host.

When it comes to web hosting there are a lot of options available. I use Good News Domains for my web hosting needs. They have several good web hosting plans to choose from, and their customer service has always been top notch. The process for getting a web host starts like this. Go to Good News Domains at www.goodnewsdomains.com and then click on the Web Hosting tab. You will see the following screen:

On the bottom of the page are the three options for web hosting at Good News Domains. They have an economy plan, a deluxe plan, and a premium plan.

For most of you the Economy plan will work great. If you think you might start more than 10 Christian blogs in your web ministry, then go with the Deluxe plan. One of the advantages of a web host is that you can have multiple sites hosted without having to spend more money. The Economy plan would allow you to have up to 10 different blogs hosted. The Deluxe plan would let you have uo to 25 blogs and the Premium plan would let you have up to 50. This might be a good option if you hope to have people in your church start their own blogs as part of your ministry.  You could purchase one web hosting plan and then let people start their own Christian Blog for free, or you could split the cost by how many people start a blog and it would only be $3 or $4 dollars a year. Starting multiple blogs on a web host is done by utilizing sub-domains. Be sure to choose the linux version if you are going to be using WordPress for your blog. Speaking of WordPress, one of the reasons I use Good News Domains is that they include WordPress in their value applications and will even install it for you.

The process of getting WordPress installed is fairly simple and I have written a series of articles on how to create a blog at My Newbie Blog (www.mynewbieblog.com). You can check out the articles there if you need a little extra help. In our next article we will talk about picking a theme and installing some plug-ins.

Starting a Church Blog - Part 2

In our first article in this Starting a Church Blog series we wrote about using one of the free blog options available to start a church blog. While the free blog services we talked about in our last article will work well for some Church Blogs, there are many churches that will be able to accomplish their goals more effectively by registering a domain name and getting a web host for their Church Website or Blog. We will start the process by talking about domain names. A domain name is the web address or URL that locates your site on the Internet. You can purchase and register a domain name for about $10/year. Before you get a domain name there is a few things you should know about domain names.

You need to get a domain name that is specific to your church or topic. Stay away from abbreviations. A well chosen domain name has potential to create the most amount of traffic to your site from people using the search engines. Let’s say we were starting a Church Blog for the First Christian Church of Fairbanks. Do not get a domain name like FCCF.com. You would be better off getting “FirstChristianChurchFairbanks” or “FairbanksChristianChurch”. Why? It seems that it would be easier for people to type in FCCF.com than FirstChristianChurchFairbanks.com. The issue is about how people who don’t know your domain name find your Church blog or website. With the right domain name, people could find you by searching for Fairbanks Churches or First Christian Church or Churches in Fairbanks. Since your domain name contains those words it has the potential of showing up on the search engines.

Once you have decided what you would like your domain name to be, you have to see if its available. To do this, I like to use Good News Domains (www.goodnewsdomains.com).

I also use Good News Domains for web hosting which we will talk about in a future article in this series. Once you are at the Good News Domain site look for the “Start a Domain Name search” box:

Now just type in the domain name you would like to have, like this:

If the domain name you want is available, you will see the following screen:

Sometimes the domain name you want isn’t available. When that happens, Good News Domains will provide you with some possible suggestions. Stick with it and you will eventually come up with find the domain name that is right for you. Once you find a domain name, follow the instructions on the Good News Domain site to get it registered. Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to get a web host. We will talk about that in our next article in this series on Church Blog.