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WordPress Church Website Tips: Google Docs

By Matt · Comments (1)

Friday, February 5th, 2010

A little while ago I wrote a series about using WordPress to build a church website. Since then, we’ve come up with a quick and easy solution for posting our worship team schedule. We have a lady who coordinates and schedules our various people who assist during Sunday mornings. She wanted to be able to post this to our website as a reference for people to be able to have at their disposal.

When she emailed me asking if there was a way to post this to our site, I knew we could do it. I just needed to find the fastest and most efficient way to get it done. Since she always types up the schedule in Microsoft Word, the solution was pretty easy: Google Docs. Google Docs lets you create, upload, edit, and share documents online. For this I was interested in uploading and sharing a document.

It takes me about 3 minutes or so every month when she sends me the worship team schedule for the month:

Upload the file to my Google Docs account.
Go to the document and click the share button and “Publish as web page…” then “Publish document.” This gives that document it’s own URL that anyone can see as long as they have the address, like this.
Copy the URL of the document.
Log in to the back-end of WordPress and go to the page where you want the document to appear.
Paste the URL into an iframe. (I talk a little bit about using iframes here)

The finished product looks like this. From a design and layout standpoint, there might be better solutions. But from a speed and simplicity standpoint, this gets the job done in a way that we are happy with. You could do the same thing or something similar to post PowerPoints, Excel documents, or PDFs in a way that people can view on the actual page of your website.

I hope this gives some of you some ideas for possible solutions to your needs with your own WordPress church websites.

Comments (1)

Categories : Websites

Tags : church website, free, google docs, wordpress

How I Built a Church Website for Free: Conclusion

By Matt · Comments (1)

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

[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]

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.

box type=”info“] Content [/box]

Comments (1)

Categories : Websites

Tags : church websites, wordpress

How I Built a Church Website for Free: Free Google Tools

By Matt · Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

When trying to make a highly functional website at no cost, signing up for a Google account is a must. If you don’t already have a Google account, you will be glad you signed up, trust me.

Once you sign up for your Google account, here are the places you need to go and how to integrate them into your free church website:

Google Webmaster Tools

When you login to the Webmaster Tools, you will add your web address into the empty field and click “Add.” Then, you will need to:

Verify your site. Google needs to know that the site you signed up for is actually yours. I suggest using a “meta tag” for your verification method. This is a little snippet of code that you will need to copy and paste into the code of your website. You should paste the code right before your the </head> tag in your website theme, which can be found in your WordPress backend by going to Appearance–>Editor–>Header (Under “Theme Files” on the right-hand side). Do a search in your web browser (CTRL+F for windows or Command+F for Mac) for the </head> tag and paste your snippet directly before it. The click “Update File” at the bottom of the page.
Enter your sitemap. Remember that Google Sitemaps plugin we installed in the last post? It automatically creates a sitemap at yourwebaddress.com/sitemap.xml. Just copy and past that into the sitemap field in the Webmaster Tools to help Google index your site in their search engine.
After your site has aged a bit, you can go back into here and look at things like how your site ranks for different search terms, who is linking to your site, and other stuff like that.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you a free way to get high-quality website statistics. Seriously, there are things in here that I don’t even know how to use. What you really want to concentrate on at first are how many Absolute Unique Visitors your site gets, what pages they are navigating to, and how they are finding your site (search engines, referrals, directly typing in the domain). This will let you know how effective your site is and how valuable of a resource it is to your church. If only 3 people a month are accesing it, then putting a whole lot of time and effort into it doesn’t make sense.

To activate it, just copy the Tracking ID they provide you into the right field in your website’s WordPress backend under Plugins–>Google Analytics. There are instructions there if you get confused.

Google Maps

We have an interactive Google map on our website, which is probably the best way to go for letting people know your location and the best way to get there. If you go to Google Maps, there is a section on the left called “My Maps” where you can create and save your own maps if you have a Google account.

Click “Create new map,” find the location of your church on the map, and then drop a “Pin” at your church’s location (on of the four icons on the top-left of the map). You can assign information to that pin by clicking on it and entering your information in the field. Then save your map.

Click on “Link” in the top-right of your map and then click on “Customize and preview embedded map.” Then adjust the settings to get the map exactly as you would like it to appear on your own website.

Here comes the tricky part. Google will give you a long bit of code that looks like this (I’ve highlighted the parts you need):

WordPress doesn’t like iframes, which is why we installed the iframes plugin in the last post. To make your map appear on your site, go to your WordPress backend and open the editor for the page where you want to map to appear. To make it work, use the following format: [iframe url width height]. Just replace the bolded part with the appropriate values from the Google code, bolded as an example in the long string of code above. Update your page and you should have a nice map on your site.

Google Calendar

Google calendar is a pretty good solution for hosting a free online calendar for churches. I’ve tried quite a few over the years, even those specifically for churches, and have decided Google offers the best compromise. The best thing about Google Calendar, in my opinion, is its user-friendliness. Adding an event to the calendar is really easy–there aren’t a bunch of drop down menus, options, and things you can mess up. You can also share it among whoever you want, so one person doesn’t have to do all of the updating.
Getting the Google Calendar on your WordPress website is a little tricky, unfortunately. For some reason, the Google Calendar code to embed the website is not compatible with the iframe plugin we used for the Google Map above. Here’s how I got it to work on our website:

Get all of the text you want on your church website’s calendar page, exactly how you want it, because going back and changing it later will be a problem.
Copy the code to embed your calendar by opening your calendar in Google and click the “Settings” link under “My Calendars” on the left-hand side.
Click on “Calendars” and then the calendar you want to share under the “Sharing” column. Check the box to “make this calendar public” and save.
Go back to Settings–>Calendars and click on the calendar you want under the left-hand Calendar column.
There is a section called “Embed this Calendar,” where you need to click the “Customize the color, size, and other options.”
That will pop up a screen that allows you to format your calendar exactly how you want it to appear on the website.
Once the calendar is how you want it, copy the code provided and go back to the backend of your WordPress website and go to your calendar page.
Switch from the Visual Editor to the HTML tab and paste your code wherever you want the calendar to appear on the page.
Click update page and then never switch back to the visual editor on that page. Whenever you switch back to the Visual Editor, it messes up the code and you will have to go back to Google, get your code, and paste it again. So make sure the page is exactly the way you want it before you paste your calendar code.
Anytime you update your calendar in Google it will get changed and stay up-to-date on your website automatically.

Other

Here are some other free Google tools that you might want to take advantage of:

Gmail – Gmail is a great way to do email. You don’t even have to change your email address. Google can import your email from your current email address. If you are getting all sorts of spam, try using Google–their spam filter is great.
Google Docs – Google docs allows you to upload, create, edit, and share PDFs, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Churches might especially be interested in the ability to create a form that you can link to for things like online surveys and registrations. You can learn how to make a form by clicking here.
Google Feedburner – Feedburner is probably the best way to manage and track your RSS feeds from your website. You can also allow people to sign up for email updates so they get your new posts directly in their inbox.

Those are all of the most important free Google tools that can help extend the functionality of your church website. Did I leave anything out?

Comments (0)

Categories : Websites

Tags : church website, gmail, google, google analytics, google calendar, google docs, google feedburner, google maps, google webmaster tools, wordpress

Church WordPress Plugins

By Matt · Comments (10)

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

In order to make the most out of your church website using WordPress, you are going to need to install a few plugins. Plugins are ways to extend the functionality of the core funtcions of WordPress and make your website do exactly what you want it to do.

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.

Comments (10)

Categories : Websites

Tags : church websites, plugins, wordpress

New Free WordPress Theme Added

By Matt · Comments (0)

Friday, March 20th, 2009

I added another free theme on my Picking a WordPress Theme post. You might want to check it out.

As happens sometimes in life, you don’t do things as early as you had hoped. I didn’t get my next post in the How I Built a Church Website for Free series until late today, and I don’t like posting substantive posts late in the day or on weekends. Look for it Monday.

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Categories : Blogging, Websites

Tags : Add new tag, theme, wordpress

Best Church WordPress Themes

By Matt · Comments (8)

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Paid Themes:

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.

Comments (8)

Categories : Websites

Tags : church websites, free church wordpress themes, hostgator, themes, wordpress

How I Built a Church Website for Free: WordPress Tutorials

By Matt · Comments (1)

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

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

Comments (1)

Categories : Websites

Tags : bluehost, church websites, iThemes, tutorials, video tutorials, wordpress

How I Built a Church Website for Free: WordPress

By Matt · Comments (17)

Friday, March 13th, 2009

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.

Comments (17)

Categories : Websites

Tags : bluehost, church websites, wordpress

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WordPress Church Website Tips: Google Docs

How I Built a Church Website for Free: Conclusion

How I Built a Church Website for Free: Free Google Tools

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New Free WordPress Theme Added

Best Church WordPress Themes

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Some of the best free church WordPress themes:

Using Themes

How I Built a Church Website for Free: WordPress Tutorials

How I Built a Church Website for Free: WordPress

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