ChurchTechToday.com

I recently interviewed pastor, blogger, and web designer, Brandon Cox, for an article I just wrote on church websites for Church & Worship Technology Magazine’s November issue. Brandon had many good things to say about using WordPress for ministry, and has even recently designed a premium WordPress theme, called “Ministry Theme.” Here’s some great advice Brandon shared with me:

“WordPress began just a few years ago as an open source blogging tool, but has recently blossomed into much more than that. Today, WordPress is used more and more as a content management system. The fact that it’s open source means that developers get to contribute to the source code that supports the system. Automattic, the company behind WordPress, earns its revenue from consulting. What does all of this mean for churches? Free software for web sites that is powerful, easy to use, and open to full design customization.

WordPress themes can be tricky to implement, but offer a virtually unending list of options. Many premium themes, such as the Ministry Theme, offer options beyond the basics such as displaying thumbnails of photographs on the front page for each article, a better division of article categories, drop down menus, etc.

Using a WordPress theme to power your church web site yields the benefit of being able to offer and organize content in a dynamic way. One can add articles, news stories, prayer requests, and other church-related content without ever having to interact with code. The built-in “what you see is what you get” editor makes editing a breeze and media such as photos, documents, and audio and video clips can be added and edited with little extra effort.

WordPressalso offers automatic generation of news feeds which, when subscribed to by readers, draws people back to your site each time you add updates. The system also creates a great interactive environment in which church members and other readers can comment on blogs and articles in an ongoing discussion format, and it can all be moderated to protect against malicious intentions.

WordPress allows for easy addition of multiple backend administrators. Editors can edit all content on the site, but can’t hurt the base code. Authors can add their own stories, but can’t edit the stories of others. And administrators can edit everything down to the design of the site itself, so it’s a highly secure system for allowing multiple content contributors.

Quality WordPress theme designers will charge anywhere between $50 and $100 per hour for customizations of a theme, depending on the complexity of the changes requested. The Ministry Theme can be customized with unique graphics and a logo for between $250 and $400. A fully custom theme, built from the ground up with a church’s particular branding and programming needs can cost upwards of $2,500, so there’s a broad range. With the Ministry Theme, I plan on offering basic customizations very affordably, if not freely, to church planters and missions organizations on a case-by-case, needs-assessed basis.

WordPress is capable of handling both small and very large projects, but it isn’t necessarily for every church. Its capabilities are extended by plugins, which are add-ons developed by the at-large WordPress community. Pluginsoffer extensive help for sermon broadcasting, shopping carts, donations, search engine optimization, and discussion forums.

Some churches, however, may find it more beneficial to have a fully-custom content management system or even another already existing CMS, such as Expression Engine, an enterprise system which offers a better division of content types. Some churches may opt for using a custom or enterprise content management system, but utilize WordPress for personalizing staff blogs as well.

I personally appreciate the entire open source philosophy as it applies to church website and software needs. By creating a sharing community of developers, we can offer the kingdom a truly great tool. Everyone contributes, everyone benefits. Every system has its weaknesses, and WordPress has its share, but for the foreseeable future, I believe it will be a great tool for the kingdom.

Have you known any churches that use WordPress for their main static website? I have not yet come across very many that are using this option, but it is intriguing. I think that if the person in charge of the web ministry is a little more technologically savvy and is able to tweak WordPress, I could indeed be a viable option. I’m sure many pastors out there use WordPress for their blogs. I use it for this blog. It can been great, and it can be frustrating at times. What are your thoughts?