Abstract:

Here is an excellent solution for building an easily-to-update church website in less than 10 minutes worth of work. And when I say easy, I mean that you don’t have to know a thing about HTML to use it. But what about the install? We’ll walk you thorough it.

Wordpress is a free blogging platform that allows you to easily maintain a website. Wordpress blogs can range from traditional looking blogs (such as this one), to websites that don’t have a hint of “blog” on them. To get more of a background on using Wordpress as the basis for your church website, I suggest reading Cory Miller’s series on Using Wordpress to Run Church Websites. While we’re at it, I suggest reading Cory Miller’s Building Rockin’ Cool Church Websites series and his Blogging for Pastors 101 series.

Note:
I’ll start of by saying that Wordpress is not the best solution for all church websites, but it does allow a church short on website designers to effectively run and maintain their website. Simply put, if you can type, you can run a Wordpress website.

For the sake of not regurgitating Cory’s work, I really suggest you read his series on Using Wordpress to Run Church Websites. I, on the other hand will simply focus on the Wordpress installation step.

Installing Wordpress

If you are currently hosted at a cPanel web-host like Zernebok (the host I mentioned in yesterday’s “Getting Started” article), there is a nice little link called Fantastico in your control panel (http://www.mydomain.com/cpanel). Fantastico allows you to install may different types of scripts without having to really do much of anything–you just fill in a form, and click “ok”. In cPanel, you can simply browse to the Fantastico installer, click on “Wordpress”, and install it without the hassle.

Revision:By Kenaniah Cerny on June 4th, 2007
One of our readers pointed out that Fantastico works fine for a fresh installation, but has issues upgrading the Wordpress installation. For more details about upgrading Wordpress, please visit the guide at http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/. This site also contains more detailed guides for installing.

If you’re one of the less fortunate who do not have a cPanel web-host, you can always view the installation instructions from the Wordpress website.