On Vineyard Church Webmaster our goal is to make it possible for every church to have a quality, well maintained, website. We provide a wide range of services to help with this process, but we will be teaching any of you who want to take on the role of church web master for your church how to start websites in this series of articles. We are firmly committed to the concept of blessing and giving wherever we can. We will be developing a church website for “Key West Vineyard Community Church” as we write these articles to help you see the process. You will be able to visit the website and see the progress.

In the Beginning…

Sorry, I always wanted to use that. There are a couple of things you need to think through as you start a website. The first question will help us answer the second question. The first question to answer is, “Will I use one of the free blog services available, or will I have my website hosted?”. There are some excellent, easy to use programs available to create your website and you will never have to pay a dime (or a penny). They are absolutely free. My two favorites are Blogger.com and WordPress.com. (I have written an article about how to create sites using these programs in an article on My Newbie Blog site called “More on Starting Free Blogs“). For churches with no budget for Internet ministry this is a great option.

If you are able, however, I would recommend you use a hosting service for your website. It will allow for a lot of options in the future that the free blogs won’t. You can have your website hosted for $50 - $80 dollars a year depending on how much space you might need and what web hosting company you use. I use GoodNewsDomains for my web hosting. They have reasonable rates and have always provided me with excellent technical support (technical support is another advantage of using a web host, the free blog services don’t have live tech support, you have to use their forums for help which can take a long time). Once you decide whether you will be using a free service or a web host we can move along to the second question.

And it was evening and morning…

Sorry. Once we decide our hosting question we need to turn our attention to our domain name (url address, the www.whatever.com, web address). If you use one of the free blog services they will work you through the domain name process. All of the domain names for those free sites include the free host name, for example, if you started a site for “yourchurch” on blogger.com the domain name would be www.yourchurch.blogspot.com (that is another drawback to the free sites, long domain names, but they are free). If you are using a web host you have more flexibility with your domain name. I suggest you use a domain name that best describes your church. The domain name you choose will have an impact on search engine results in the future. You will want people to be able to find your church website by searching for the name of your church on Google. If you use a nickname, or initials, your church website won’t show up on the search engines. If your church is called First Community Church and you are in Fargo, you will want a domain name that is www.firstcommunitychurchfargo.com Don’t try and shorten it to FCCF.com or FCC.com as this will never show up on the search engines. It may be easier to remember but the only people who will ever find your site that way are people who already have the web address. You want people who are searching for churches in your area to be able to find your church on Google. Once you decide what domain name you want, go to GoodNewsDomains and see if it is available. A domain name will cost you about $10 a year. (For a detailed description of how to get a domain name and a web host read an article I write called “Create a Blog You Can be Proud Of“.

And then He rested….

For the rest of our articles in this series we will be setting up a hosted church website for “Key West Vineyard Community Church”. We are setting this site up as a sub-domain to this main site. It allows us to set up the site for free and yet gives us the advantage of being a hosted site. We can do that because our main site, Church Web Master is a hosted site. That allows us to set up as many as 25 sub-domain sites for no extra charge. Since we are using this site as an example, this works best for our purposes. If we were setting the site up as a stand alone site we would use the domain name www.keywestvineyardchurch.com and we would use a web host. The rest of the articles will be written assuming you have a domain name and a web host.