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As website management becomes easier, to be able to use this specific medium for even more than one page of material continues to grow. For churches, there are plenty of solutions to utilize their websites nevertheless maintain them without having a great investment in time or money. Most churches require a paid receptionist or secretary, and it’s now easy to maintain several functional pages without a great deal of technical knowledge.
There are many turnkey packages available as a good basis for a function website. They fall into the category of “contact management systems” or “CMS”. One of the most popular, and easiest to work with is WordPress. WordPress is free, relatively easy-to-use, and it is well supported with free add-ons for practically any feature.
Hosting a website is also a consideration. Should a church host its own individual website or use a internet hosting service for its webpage? To begin with, it might seem more cost effective to acquire a $300 computer and host one’s own website. The average cost of a hosting service is around $100 a year, in so doing, the payback for hosting one’s own server is about 3 years. Consider the standard life of a computer is approximately 36 months, and suddenly, the comparative advantage shifts to the hosting service. Then consider that a hosting service also maintains the hardware, upgrades the software, includes a tech support staff and customer service staff, and in most cases integrates email and various other services at no additional charge. All of these products are additional costs if a person maintains their own personal server. if any damage occurs to the computer along with software on one’s own server, it has an additional cost and loss of time. It is quite clearly, not worth it, to maintain one’s own server.
After the basic CMS software is hosted and running, there are many items which can be included within a church website. The first is contact information, service hours, and location, together with a searchable map for driving directions. Next, each ministry can have a separate page with specific information which includes activities, duties for workers, and schedules. Sermons can be made available for download, for streaming online, and for podcasting.
What things to avoid on a church website include publishing copyrighted material. Therefore, broadcasting worship songs is ordinarily against the rules. Also, personal membership information should not be available. It is feasible to make an attempt to password protect this material. Usually, however, the people that want to misuse this information know a lot more about website hosting when compared to the church staff. Therefore, it is not worth the risk to make available information that is likely to be tempting for one to steal.
As church websites get more functional at an affordable price, each church gets the possibility to invest a small amount of time and money into making a highly-effective website and improve its communication and services to its members.
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by John D Meyers
