We are continuing to provide advice on becoming a Vineyard church web master in this series of articles. We are going to add a couple of plugins and start a contact page in this article. By this time, you should be able to download and upload files to your church website. If you are in need of help with this process I would encourage you to go to My Newbie Blog and read the articles about installing plugins.

Plugins

Plugins are a wonderful addition to WordPress sites. They allow you to customize your site so that it does what you want it to do. We are going to activate three plugins at this time. The first plugin to activate is Akismet. This plugin actually comes with your WordPress installation. You just need to activate it. You also need a WordPress API key which you can get for free at WordPress.com (there is an article about this process on My Newbie Blog). The Akismet plugin is a spam blocker. You will need it to keep spammers from ruining your site.

There are two more plugins to install at this time. The first one is the Verse of the Day (VOTD) plugin. This plugin is a nice addition to the site as it automatically updates the site with a new Bible verse every day. It is easy to install in a widget on your sidebar. The other plugin to install is the Contact Form 7 plugin. This plugin provides a form so that people can contact you. This is much better than putting an email address on your site. If you have an email address written out on your site, you can almost guarantee you will get spam on that email account. If you have to give an email address on your site, spell out the @ as [at] and the . as [dot]. For example johnqpublic[at]gmail[dot]com.

Once your plugins are activated, add the VOTD widget to your sidebar and start a page called Contact. You can see how it all works at the Key West Vineyard Community Church site.