Have a website for your church? Add a blog!  Don’t have a website yet?  Create a blog site and skip the other website! 

A blog is a term that is used on the web for a “web” “log” or an online web journal. If you already have a church website, adding a blog is a great way to communicate between services and meetings. It is also a great way for new folks to get acquainted with the people and ministries in your church.   If you don’t yet have a website for your church, you can create a blog site which can do everything you needed a church website to do, AND MORE! 

My software recommendation for setting up a blog is Word Press.    There are 2 options for getting a FREE blog using Word Press; wordpress.com and wordpress.org.  Near the end of the article I give you a bit more technical information, but for now, just read over the top 6 ways that you can use a blog for increasing participation at your church. 

When you use a word press blog, you can add articles, you can choose to allow people to comment on the articles, but you can also add complete pages to your website.  If you already have a church website, then you might just want to add a blog and add a link from your website to the blog.  But if you do not yet have a church website, a blog site might be the best way to make a site that will be effective for getting your congregation involved and for alerting new people to your church.

Here are the pages that I think every church website should have.  If you don’t have these pages on your website, create them on your blog site!

          What we believe

                   Mission

                   Vision

                   Denominational affiliation

          Ways to get involved

                   Adults

                   College Age

                   High School

                   Junior High

                   Elementary

                   Nursery

Our staff

          If you are going to visit….

                   Location and Directions

                   Time of Worship

                   Sunday school info

                   What about the kids? 

                   Parking

                   Dress

                   Style of Services

                   Other helpful info

 Top 7 ideas for Using your Blog         

1.   Use your blog to communicate the monthly news instead of a published newsletter.  (There will still be some folks who will need to have a printed version, so be sure to make your blog template printer friendly.  Here is an article that can help with that. http://ideas.arikfr.com/make-your-blog-printer-friendly.html.)

a.      Benefits of a blog instead of print newsletter

                                                  i.      The articles and info that you publish will be available in the archives until you delete it so families can refer back to the articles.

                                                 ii.      You can decide to allow readers to add their comments on topics (and you can decide whether you want to “publish” the responses or not) so that you can have some conversations about a topic. 

                                               iii.      You can allow people the opportunity to sign up to receive updates for your blog via RSS feeds.  You can add an RSS feed to your blog site just by dragging and dropping. 

2.      Allow other ministry leaders the opportunity to post articles on the blog.  You can assign the articles posted to various categories, so it is easy to put all articles for a particular ministry under it’s own category. 

3.      Use your blog to “educate” and “inspire”.

4.      Post letters from missionaries (or links to their blogs) on your website

5.      Keep one category of posts as a prayer list.  You can even password protect a posting if you are uncomfortable letting everyone on the web have access to the prayer requests. 

6.      Start an online book study on your blog. Encourage all your constituents to read a certain book.  You can have a discussion about the book on the blog.  Here is one suggestion for a book that every parent (and teacher) should read.  Kid CEO by Ed Young (http://www.creativepastors.com/product_1017)

7.      Add a picture gallery to your blog. If you upload pictures on a regular basis, you will get lots of your members checking out the blog on a regular basis! 

The neat thing about Wordpress is that you can add “features”  (which are called “widgets”) without having technical expertise.  They typically just drop and drag into your site and you can start using them.

Here is a bit more of the technical information about the Word Press blogs! 

Click here for a VERY brief summary of the differences: http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/05/07/wordpresscom-vs-wordpressorg/

WordPress.com (see features at  http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=7015&page&replies=3)  is where you can create a Free WordPress blog which is hosted on the WordPress.com site. (That means you can do it without having technical expertise and you don’t need to even have to pay for hosting – but there are some limitations – including perhaps making it printer friendly. )

WordPress.org (see features at http://wordpress.org/about/features/)  is the open source site for WordPress where you can download the program, read/contribute to the documentation, download plugins and themes, get help in these forums....all for "Free" – but you need a bit more technical expertise and a web host where you can host a SQL database and uses PHP.

If you need help setting up a wordpress.org blog, we would be glad to help you!  Give us a jingle at 800-395-8556 or email info@welcomingcommunity.com.  It should not be more than $100 to set up the whole site and pay for the first year of hosting as well as your own URL.  Your recurring annual fees would be the hosting fee (probably less than $10 a month) and the renewal of your domain name ($15 a year).  Other than that, you should not have any recurring fees.  

Making sure your template is print friendly is something that takes a bit of technical expertise.  We can do the technical work for you for a $30 one time fee.