WordPress 2.8 released yesterday, and this upgrade addresses one of the biggest shortfalls in WordPress: the widget interface. It used to be possible to see all of your sidebars and widgets at once and drag and drop your widgets straight from one sidebar to another. I believe it’s been since version 2.3 that that functionality was lost. Since then, you had to view your sidebars one at a time, and moving a widget between one sidebar and another was very cumbersome.

WordPress 2.8 now puts all of your sidebars back on the same screen together, allowing you to easily drag and drop from one to another. There is also a new section for “Inactive Widgets” that will allow you to remove a widget from your sidebar, but keep your custom code or settings within that widget for later. You can also have an unlimited number of each widget active in your sidebar, another big plus that will help solve a few problems I’ve run into.

There’s some other good stuff in this latest version of WordPress:

• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors – Very helpful for people who like to play around and tinker with code.
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin interface – While good in theory, we’ll have to see how well this works in practice.
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns – Not that big of a deal to me, I don’t think. I’ll have to play around and see.
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options – I do like this. On our church website, we have about 30 different pages. Now I can set that page to display all the pages at once instead of having to click through and hunt for the page I want.
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment – Finally.
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation – I’ll just take their word for it here.

WordPress just keeps getting better and better. I’ve written about using it for building your own church website, and now there’s even more reasons to switch. Check out the video below for some of the highlights.

Hopefully people will find my series on building a church website for free (or pretty dang close to free) helpful and instructive. I think I covered the major bases necessary for you to build a highly functional self-hosted church website using WordPress. If you think there is something major I left out, let me know through a comment or an email and I will either add another post or just respond to you directly.

A few years ago, I had no idea what I was doing when I signed up for my first self-hosted website. I almost cancelled my account because I was so confused. But I persevered and have gained some valuable tools and skills for doing basic web building just by playing around.

For those of you who are skeptical, that would be my advice to you: just start playing around. Add stuff, delete stuff, see what happens when you take a line of code from one place and move it to another, adjust the values in the stylesheet, and try adding your own flair to your project (Mandatory disclaimer: always make sure you know how to put stuff back to normal in case you mess something up!). You will be surprised how quickly you learn. If that fails, there is always Google.

If both of those fail and you are just totally lost, email me and I’ll see if I can help or at least point you in the right direction. A web presence of some sort is mandatory for pretty much any organization or ministry, but it doesn’t have to cost much while looking good at the same time. Give it a shot, and let me know if I can be of any help.

Blessings on your ministry.

Installing plugins is now extremely easy. In your WordPress dashboard there is a section on the left called “Plugins” with an “Add New” submenu. Just click on that, search for the plugin you want, and click “Install” on the desired plugin. After that, you will have to click “Activate Plugin” to make it functional.

Most plugins have options you will have to configure in some way. Usually a plugin will add a new link on the left hand side of your WordPress dashboard. You might have to click around a little bit to figure out how to configure your new plugins.

All that being said, here are some plugins that I either installed on my church website or think you should keep in mind for yours. Feel free to add your own or comment on my list. If you know of a better plugin to do similar functions, let me know:

• WP-Cache or WP Super Cache – [UPDATE: see the comments for Adam Walker Cleaveland's experience with this plugin] Without getting too nerdy in explanation, these plugins will make your website run faster. I have never used them, but if you have a large population still on dial up (if that’s even possible) or are getting lots of traffic, these plugins can help you out a bit. By the way, only use one of these at a time, not both. These are just the two most popular plugins that perform this function. One may work better than the other for your church website.
• Contact Form 7 – If all you need on your website is a simple email form for people to contact someone, this plugin should suit you. But if you need something a little more complex, the next plugin will do.
• cforms II – If you need custom forms for people to fill out, this is the best plugin. You can create huge long forms with checkboxes, text fields, radio buttons, anything you want. Even better, this plugin not only emails you the data every time someone fills in their information, it can also create a database of all the information entered that can be downloaded into Excel.
• get_themes – To quickly install new themes on your site, this plugin makes it really simple.
  
• Email Obfuscator – I’m not sure how well this works in reality, so if someone has any better solutions, please comment below. The idea is that this plugin finds email addresses on your website and then makes them more difficult to read for the spam robots that troll the internet looking for email addresses to add to their email lists.
• Embed Iframe – To do a few of the things I will show you in the next post, you will need this plugin.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – Again, this plugin will make more sense after you read the next post, but it has to do with tracking your website’s traffic statistics.
• Google XML Sitemaps – You want to make sure that your all of your church website is in Google’s index and shows up in appropriate searches, right? This plugin, in addition to (again) what I will show you in the next post will go a long way to making sure Google doesn’t overlook anything on your site.
• ICS Calendar – I use this plugin to import calendar data from our church’s Google Calendar (which will be explained, you guesed it, in the next post) and displays an automatically updating list of upcoming events.
• Page Links To – If you want to create a main navigation link that goes to another website, this is the easiest way to do that.
• pageMash – WordPress doesn’t make it easy to put pages in the exact order that you want them in the navigation menus. Thus plugin makes it really easy.
• Role Manager – WordPress allows you to give registered members of your website four different levels of access to the back end of your website. For example, if you just want someone to be able to write articles but not install plugins, you can do that. However, if you want to create really custom levels of access, this plugin allows you to control every aspect of accesibility.
• WenderHost Subpages widget – If the theme you are using is a little bit limited in it’s navigation capability this plugin can make up for that. It creates a widget you can put in your sidebar that will only show up if you are on a page that has subpages under neath it. Otherwise, it disappears.
• Search Everything – For whatever reason WordPress’ default search function only searches posts. Since most churches will be using this on websites comprised mostly of pages, this widget will allow your pages to be searchable on your website.
  
• Akismet – If you allow comments on your website underneath pages or posts, this plugin is a must-have to keep spam comments at bay. It comes automatically installed in every version of WordPress, but you need a free WordPress.com account in order for it to work.

There you have it. Remember to add you own commentary in the comments below. Up next will be a post on how to use some free Google tools to make your church website even better.

After doing a lot of website development work, I must say that paying for a WordPress theme is usually the best bang for your buck. It will save you hours upon hours of time, it will work, and you will have the designer available to answer your questions. All of the paid themes suitable for churches that I have seen are less than $99. It’s worth the one-time cost to pay for a decent theme. Below are my recommendations for where you need to look for your church websites (If you really need a free theme, keep scrolling down, and I list them at the bottom of the page):

StuidioPress

StuidioPress has been making high-quality WordPress themes for a long time. I used one of their themes years ago and it was very advanced at the time. It seems like they’ve gotten even better lately. The Genesis Theme Framework is all the rage right now–it seems like there are all sorts of websites using it to build custom sites. They have one great theme for churches, the StudioPress Outreach Theme, but some of the other themes would work well for churches, too. These themes are definitely worth checking out.

iThemes

iThemes is often times my top recommendation for a novice WordPress user trying to build a church website. iThemes has a lot of different themes, all paid, many of which would work fabulous for churches. In fact, I decided to purchase their Architect Theme for our church’s website. Now they even have a theme built just for churches with the Foundation Church Builder Theme. iThemes could have the perfect solution for your church.

ChurchThemer

This is a new company that I’ve never used personally, but their themes are built specifically for churches and claim to be very user-friendly. Their themes look really great. If you use them, drop a comment below detailing your experience.

Disclosure: If you click on the links above and purchase a theme, I will receive a small affiliate payment for referring you. I originally wrote this post in March 2009 (I’ve updated it periodically since) to help people with their church websites, and I didn’t know anything about affiliate links. All of the above themes were in my original post. After about a year and a half of doing this, I realized that I could earn a referral fees for sending these businesses free traffic, so now I use affiliate links. I never recommend a product I don’t believe in. Contact me if you have any questions about this.

Some of the best free church WordPress themes:

• [UPDATE] Arras – I don’t know anything about this theme, other than I saw it on a church site the other day and it looks real nice.
• [UPDATE - Ministry Theme is now a premium-, paid theme] Ministry Theme – As you might guess, this theme is built specifically for ministry websites. I’ve never come across this theme, but it looks really great. As of right now, the theme isn’t able to be downloaded as the creators of the theme tweak it to be more compatible with WordPress 2.7. It also looks like they may re-release it as a paid theme, but up until now it was free. Thanks to Bill Robbins of Organized Themes for pointing this one out.
• Ashford – This theme claims to be among the most user-friendly for the novice. Among the unique traits of this theme is the ability to edit certain aspects of the website from the front end rather than having to login to the back end of the website at do all the editing. I have never used this theme, but if you have never used WordPress before (or will be allowing other people to edit the site who have little experience), this might be the perfect theme.
• LivingOS UPSILON – A very clean theme with a rotating picture header. Changing the pictures takes a little bit of code work, but it’s pretty easy to figure out. I used this theme to create PassingOnFaith.com for a conference I helped organize. This theme was designed specifically for churches. Check out the other themes at LivingOS.
• [UPDATE - Organized themes appears to only have paid themes now]Organized Themes.com – Run by a guy who worked as an associate pastor and realized churches need a simple way to present their web content and began designing WordPress themes. I’ve never used them, so I can’t speak for their user-friendliness but a few of them look really nice.
• Ocean Mist – Another really simple site, but I’ve never used it so can’t speak for it.
• Vigilance – This is the new theme that I just switched to here at MattCleaver.com. It has some really sweet features that could make it a great site for churches to use. Go to the linked page to see the extra goodies that I am not using right now on my site. I can also vouch that it is very user friendly, a great place to start for newbies who want some flexibility and customization options. This is one of the best free themes I’ve run into in a long time.
• Titan – Just released on March 11 by the same guy who made the above Vigilance theme, Titan is another amazing looking theme. This theme offers drop-down menus that are helpful for sites with a lot of pages.
• WooThemes (mostly paid themes, but some freebies) – WooThemes has some really sweet themes, most of them paid. There are a few free themes though, like the Original Premium News theme that Tim Schmoyer uses.

Using Themes

So far in this series we’ve learned the advantages of a self-hosted church website, hosting it through HostGator, and how to install WordPress to manage your website content. But now your website looks really ugly and boring, and we can’t have that. Thankfully, giving your WordPress website a whole new look is as simple as downloading a few files and then uploading them to your website (click here for step-by-step instructions to install a theme). These collections of files that style your website and give it a particular look are called “Themes.” There are tons of both free and paid themes available for WordPress, from the simple blog theme to a complex news and video website. If you Google “best WordPress themes” you will get a ton of websites who have compiled a list of themes that they think stand out. If you want a really great-looking website a paid theme is probably the way to go ultimately. Be warned though, that some of these themes require a significant amount of customization that may not be really easy to do at first. Most of these paid themes include step-by-step instructions for how to customize things like rotating picture banners, but you might have to dig a little bit to find it. Also, for the best appearance, you will need to crop pictures to certain sizes at times, which can be done pretty easily online at sites like Picnik.com.

Please leave some links and comments in the comments section below if you know of other great themes for churches. And yes, you can promote your own themes, paid or free! If I like them, I’ll add them to the body of the post.

[box type="info"]Use the Coupon Code “ChurchWebsite” when you sign up for website hosting through HostGator and you will get a 25% discount from HostGator. That also makes sure I get credited for referring you. Thanks! Find out more about HostGator.[/box]

I was planning on taking a break from this series until Monday, but I figured that there might be some people out there who are in need of some help. If you are a complete newbie to WordPress, it can be a little confusing. I’m sure if you’ve paid money to sign up for an account with BlueHost.com you don’t want to wait until Monday before you get your hands dirty. So as not to leave you hanging, I found some WordPress tutorials for you. Below is a link to some video tutorials on using WordPress 2.7, everything from writing a post and page to playing with widgets. If you know of other good tutorials, leave them in the comments section and I will update the post with them.

• WordPress 2.7 video tutorials on iThemes.com

WordPress Overview

[NOTE: If you are absolutely a complete novice to websites or self-hosted platforms, the information below might not be enough to get you started, but I didn't want to bog people down writing a 5,000 word post explaining every detail of creating a site. If you are interested in doing this and would like some help, drop a comment and I will get in contact with you.]

If you are self-hosting a church website through BlueHost.com, the next question you have to ask yourself is how you are actually going to “build” the site. For the most part, the old ways of writing HTML code by hand are long-gone (thankfully!). There are quite a few free ways to build a site on BlueHost, but the best choice for the amateur, in my opinion, is WordPress. WordPress was meant to be a blog software, but some recent developments have made it a great way to host a fairly simple website. WordPress is a great choice for a variety of reasons:

• Free. Which, obviously is always a plus. There are really good detailed instructions on how to use the site on WordPress.org.
• Huge Community of Users. WordPress probably powers literally millions of websites, from personal blogs (like mine) to professional sub-sites with Ford or CNN. If you are having an issue you can Google “wordpress [your problem]” and probably figure out what you need to do.
• Simple to Publish Content. If you know how to use a word processor, you can probably figure out how to publish content using WordPress. If you are wary of going the self-hosting route because you aren’t sure if you can handle operating a WordPress website, go to WordPress.com and create an account. You can see what it is like to publish a website using WordPress. The back-end interface is essentially exactly the same as a self-hosted WordPress site.
  • Why shouldn’t I just use a WordPress.com site? WordPress.com offers a good way for some people to publish content on the web, but I found it too restrictive for some of the things I wanted to do. Many of the custom tweaks I will outline in the next few posts will be impossible on WordPress.com because of the restrictions they place on their websites. If you self-host a website, you can do whatever you want to customize it. If you are confused about the WordPress.com vs WordPress.org differences, read this page.
• Tons of Free Themes. WordPress is a web software for managing content: pages, posts, advertisements, widgets, etc. “Themes” provide the style for all of your content. If I want my blog to look different, I can just install a new theme and it gets a whole new face lift without messing up all of the posts and pages I’ve already made but integrates them into the new theme’s style. There are literally hundreds, probably thousands of free themes out there that you can use to give your site a custom look. If you want something really unique, you can pay for a professional theme, and they are usually under $100.
• Automatic Upgrades. Web publishing software is simply just a collection of files that “talk” to each other in order to manage your content, and WordPress is no different. The problem is that when there is a bug in the software or developers want to add new features, you have to re-install those files, which can be difficult and complex. When WordPress released version 2.7, you now have the ability to automatically upgrade WordPress. When you login to the back-end of your website, you will see a notice to upgrade your version of WordPress, and a few clicks later you’re finished with the upgrade. Super easy.
• Plugins! Plugins are one of the best things about WordPress. The normal WordPress software can only do so much, and if you want to do something fancy without writing your own code (who wants to do that?), then chances are someone else has written a plugin for WordPress that will do it. Want to make a contact form for your website? There’s a plugin for that. Want to show an automatically updating list of coming events from a Google calendar? There’s a plugin for that. Want your Twitter stream to automatically tell the world when you make a new post? There’s a plugin for that. There’s a plugin for pretty much everything. And now you can search for plugins within the back-end of your website and install them in a few easy clicks. Amazing.

There are probably tons more reasons to use WordPress to manage the content of your church website, but those are a good start.

Installing WordPress

So, you’ve got an account with BlueHost.com and want to install WordPress. How do you do it? It’s pretty simple.

Find WordPress in your cPanel. When you login to your BlueHost account, you see a bunch of confusing stuff, 75% of which you may never use. For now, scroll down to the “Software/Services” section and click on the WordPress icon.

Click the big green “Install Now” button at the bottom.

Fill in all the important information:

• For where you want WordPress installed, just type in “wordpress” (lowercase–just like in the picture). All of the WordPress documentation you will find on the internet assumes you install the files in a directory named “wordpress” and will make your life easier.
• Fill in the title of your site, although you can change this later. Don’t spend too much time on this.
• Make sure the four boxes towards the bottom are checked and you are set.
• Click the green “Complete” button.

You will be taken to a page with all of the information for your newly installed WordPress website. I would suggest you immediately do the following:

• Login to your site using the link provided. It should be http://www.yourdomainname.com/wordpress/wp-admin
• Login using the credentials and password given to you.
• This takes you to the back-end of your site. This is where you will control, manage, and publish almost 100% of your website. Right now, find the “Users” link in the left-hand column. Click on it.
• Then click on the “Your Profile” link that appears in the drop down below the “Users” menu.
• This takes you to your profile. At the bottom of that page you can change your password. Do that now.
• Don’t forget to hit “Update Profile” when you are done to save your new password.

Now you have a new WordPress site installed on your domain name. However, when you go to www.yourdomainname.com, your website will not come up because the website is actually located at www.yourdomainname.com/wordpress. I would suggest you follow these instructions so that your site comes up when people type in www.yourdomainname.com.

One you do that, you’re ready to publish to the world. Unfortunately, the site is pretty ugly right now, and we can’t have that. The next post will tell you how to make that church website a lot more pretty for no (or minimal) cost.

[1/15/11 UPDATE! I now recommend HostGator for your website hosting needs. I have switched to them myself and been very pleased. They offer a few advantages over Bluehost, the company I had been recommending for about 2 years.]

Why HostGator?

The starting point for a self-hosted church website is to choose which company you are going to use to host the site. Most of the top hosting sites have plenty of capability for churches to implement what they need in a website. My current host for my websites and the one I recommend for churches is HostGator. HostGator currently has a few great features:

• Low Cost. If you sign up using the “ChurchWebsite” coupon code, new accounts can sign up for as low as $45 a year ($3.71 a month), and the plan I recommend for churches (the “Baby” plan) can be as low as $72 a year ($5.96 a month) depending on the length of the term you sign up for.
• Host Unlimited Domains on One Account. With that one account you can host an unlimited amount of websites for no additional cost as long as you own the domain names.
• Plenty of everything. Email accounts, storage, bandwidth, it’s all plenty for even a large church. Unless you are planning on having a few hundred thousand visitors a day, HostGator is more than capable for your needs.
• Support. HostGator has great support forums where users have posted their questions and received quick answers. I have never had to call HostGator for support, I just search their forums and find an answer instantly. They also have lots of tutorial videos for people who are tying to do something new.
• Scalability. If your website hits the big-time and starts getting lots of traffic, HostGator has higher-tiered plans that will be able to cope with the demands of your growing website.

How I’ve Used Our Hosting Account

I started using a self-hosted website solution in February 2007 to make HopeYouthMinistry.com. The youth ministry had a website when I arrived in June 2006, but it was one of those Christian-specific sites that was supposed to be “user friendly” but really wasn’t. I’m sure it was also costing us something like $400 a year (they’re out of business now). Switching to a self-hosted site would save us money and give us more flexibility. Looking back I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I’m so glad I made the decision to try a self-hosted site and haven’t looked back.

After getting the original account for HopeYouthMinistry.com, I realized that I could add additional websites for free as long as you owned the domain name. When our church decided we wanted to host an outreach event for the community called “Taste of Hope” I bought TasteOfHope.org and we used that for publicity, which worked really well. The ability to make completely new websites for only the cost of a domain name is a real benefit of using a service like HostGator. For larger churches that do big events and have complex ministries, the possibilities are wide open for creating simple, dedicated sites with their own domain name for free.

How I Made the New Website for Free

Since the church already paid for website hosting for HopeYouthMinistry.com I realized that we could move our existing HopeLutheran.net website to the youth ministry hosting plan for no cost. We already owned the HopeLutheran.net domain name, which means all I had to do was the nerdy work necessary to point that domain name to our HopeYouthMinistry.com account (email me if you are in a similar situation but don’t know how it works).

So, we were ready to go from paying $200 a year (that is in addition to what we were already paying for the youth ministry site) for our main church website that was hosted through a church website provider to paying $0 a year by moving it to a hosted account. Now all I had to do was figure out how I wanted to build the site, which is coming up next.

If you’ve already heard enough and are ready to sign up for your own account, go to HostGator.

When I learned that our account was up for renewal at the end of February I went to a few people who had a vested interest in the website and asked if they had had any frustrations with our current site. They did. So I asked what they would think about me designing us a new website for free that would save us $200 a year, look a lot better, offer higher levels of customization, up-to-date functionality, website statistics, and more. Of course, it sounded like a no-brainer (because it was).

The finished product is the site to the right. Everyone is pretty pleased with version 1.0 of the website, and even more new features are going to be added. I know that many churches are struggling financially out there, and so I thought I would offer a step-by-step guide to making a cost-effective website solution for a church.

One little caveat: there is a little trick why this site could have been free, which I will explain later in the series. So, be forewarned that if you start from scratch it won’t exactly be free for your church, more like $85 a year. But I’ll explain how you can add multiple websites for minimal cost .

The web host I’ve used since February 2007 has been BlueHost.com I now recommend to people is HostGator, and I’ve been really pleased with their services. I think they offer the perfect solution for most churches wanting to self-host a website. If you can’t wait for the rest of the series to jump in, you can go ahead and go to HostGator’s website and jump in. Otherwise, get ready for the first post in the next couple of days.