Wordpress for Churches

Posted by Andy Hoyland in Wordpress on Aug 2nd, 2009 | 2 responses

As you may know I have made a few church sites in my time and have, recently, been rather partial to using the old Wordpress blogging platform as a very handy CMS for these church sites. Both Firwood Church, Manchester and St John’s Church, Sheffield have been using Wordpress to power their sites for some time now and, as far as I know, they are very happy with the way that it works. Wordpress is great because it’s free, it’s open source, it’s easy to use, it’s well structured and it’s easily upgradeable using (usaully also free) plugins.

I just wanted to pull together some of the sites and tools I have found useful in turning a blogging platform into a simple yet very effective content management system that makes it realistic for a church with pretty much any budget to have an easily updateable, fantastic looking website that can be used to communicate with church members, newcomers, people looking for a church or even as an outreach opportunity.

The first couple of places to point out are Living Open Source and Church Communications Pro. Two very fine websites offering loads of tips, not only for using Wordpress, but for church communication in general. In particular the Living OS site’s series from way back in 2007 “Blogging your church with Wordpress” has been very informative. Church Communications Pro produced an equally useful series on Wordpress For Church Websites.

Noupe.com has published a comprehensive guide for using Wordpress as a CMS and while not being aimed at churches all of the information within the guide is useful for anyone wanting to use WP. It also includes some really nice examples of sites built with WP.

One important thing to consider when creating any website is the design of the site. Time for a bit of a shameless plug but Hoyland Web Services would be more than happy to create you a design and we’re able to work with pretty much any brief from “We don’t have a clue” to “Here’s what we want it to look like” but there are loads of ready made themes out there for use with Wordpress that, with a little bit of customisation, can make your site look pretty spectacular. Take a look, for example, at Studiopress. I have been a fan of Brian Gardner ever since I used his Christmas Theme on my blog a few years back and his work, whatever name it is given, is always spot on. All his themes are available for free or as paid themes that come with support. I am an affiliate of Studiopress (although probably their worst one!) so drop me a line if you’re interested in buying any of his themes. Tim (from Living Open Source) has also created some very fine free themes that are specifically aimed at church use.

The final thing I’m going to mention here are plugins. These are usually free bits of code that ‘plug in’ to the Wordpress setup and increase the functionality of the site using them. I personally think plugins are great but some people don’t like them. A few of the plugins I would use on any Wordpress driven website are:

Podpress – although support has been questionable over recent months I would recommend Podpress to anyone wanting to use their church site for sharing any audio.
Akismet – comes built in with Wordpress but you have to register with Wordpress.com for it to work. It’s free though and stops spam comments appearing on your site.
Featured Content Gallery – a great plugin that enables you to have a dynamic slideshow of posts on your site. Really useful for making the front page look more interesting!
Reftagger – another great plugin that transforms any bible reference on your site so that when the user hovers over the reference they see the verse. Fully customisable with lots of versions of the bible available.
Contact Form – possibly not the most expansive contact form available but very reliable and easy to use.
Subsrcibe2 – an easy to use subscription system allowing people to easily sign up to get updates from your site to their inbox.
All In One SEO – good if you want to improve search rankings and keep a nice clean website.
Google Sitemaps – again – good for rankings and keeping Google happy.

Ok – I’m going to stop at 8 but I could go on!

Firwood Church There is so much more I could say about Wordpress for Church use but I am sure you’ll stop reading way before now. Needless to say Hoyland Web Services would be delighted to help you in any way if you are looking at creating or changing a church website. We don’t HAVE to work with Wordpress but we enjoy it lots when we do! Get in touch if you would like to know more. If you mention this post when talking to us I’m pretty sure we can wangle some kind of discount too. Or maybe throw in free hosting for a year…