Today, I’m kicking off another tutorial series …

I’m calling this new series Using WordPress to Run Church Websites. In this series, I want to explore how a church could use WordPress, the free blogging platform that runs this site and thousands more like it, as a cheap, easy and flexible content management system to both create a church website as well as easily maintain it.

Don’t be baffled by the phrase “content management system”(or CMS). That fancy phrase is just a way to describe online software programs that allow people to easily update websites without the use of desktop software like Adobe DreamWeaver or Microsoft FrontPage. Everything is done on the Internet using an interface that often resembles a word processor like Microsoft Word.

I tell most people that if they can operate Microsoft Word, they can use a content management system like WordPress.

Let me say at the outset of this series that I think WordPress is NOT a good alternative for all churches to use to run their main website. In fact, WordPress is designed primarily to create and maintain blogs. BUT it is flexible enough with lots of functionality to also run a primary website.

And I DO believe it could be an easy and affordable solution for the thousands of small- to medium-sized churches out there struggling to maintain or even create an Internet presence.

Because I use WordPress for the websites I design, I thought this might be a good tutorial series for those churches to walk through. So in this series, I’m going to share with you some of the tweaks and lessons I’ve learned with using this powerful program to run a small church website and how to leverage it for greater exposure for your church.

At times this will get technical, I apologize beforehand for it, but I will endeavor to keep this as simple as possible. Along the way, if you have questions or ideas for posts, please send me an email.

So without further ado, let the series begin.

5 Reasons to Choose WordPress to Run Your Church Website

Here they are:

1. It’s a free content management system – Although it’s built to be a blogging platform, it has a lot of function and flexibility to also be used as a content management system with the right tweaks. That is absolutely free to use.

2. It’s easy to use – Blogging platforms are built to be easy to use. WordPress is used by thousands and thousands of bloggers across the globe and has benefited from their insights to make it better and better. So adding new website pages is super easy. I put it this way … if you can use Microsoft Word with relative ease, you can use WordPress.

3. The search engine love it – Google and the other search engines love WordPress – meaning they get “indexed” quicker and better. And with special bells and whistles (called plugins), they’ll love your site even more … giving you and your church website better exposure in search engine rankings.

4. There are thousands of free templates available – I don’t like to recreate the wheel if there’s a good wheel available that’s also FREE. Check out the WordPress Theme Viewer here to see all the current free themes being offered by designers all over the world. And new themes are being designed and added almost daily. [By the way, templates are called “themes” in WordPress-speak.]

5. You’re in control of it – WordPress is installed on your website hosting account, meaning you control it. And because it’s free (called “open source”), all you have to pay for is your website hosting account.

TAKE A TEST DRIVE: The best way to see how WordPress works is to get a free account at WordPress.com. Althought there’s minor differences to the free version, but it’s basically the same. So go get a free account and take it for a test drive.