Last week, we kicked off a new series on the site called “Where to Start?” Where to Start? is a step by step series that helps you build a website from scratch on your own by giving you a variety of options to choose from. Last week’s article, titled “Picking Your Site’s Backend,” was a review of a variety of Content Management Systems for all different types of budgets.

Follow the Series Step by Step:

1. Picking Your Site’s Backend
2. Why Use Wordpress?
3. Picking a Host

Getting Started

Today, we’re going to be looking at one of those CMS in more detail – WordPress. WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL. This is great for cash-strapped ministries!

If you are new to WordPress and looking for reasons why you should listen to the guys at New Media Ministry and use WordPress as your a CMS (content management system) with your new website, let me give you some.

User Friendly

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Easy to Use

When I try to convince new clients to use Wordpress, I tell them everytime that if you can use Microsoft Word to type up a paper or letter or something, then you will have NO trouble using Wordpress. It’s that easy. This is the screen you will see when writing new content and editing old content. Looks fairly familiar and simple eh? Well it is as simple as it looks.

Themes Support

Themes in WordPress are basically the design and layout of the site. Since this site is run on Wordpress, we customized an existing Theme for it to fit our needs. You will never run short of themes when using WordPress. You can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. It is simple to swap out themes literally at the click of a button (which is great for adding special touch to your website during things like the Holidays, or Easter, etc.).

Plugins Extend Functionality

WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything that you want and can be installed in a jiffy. For example, you want to paginate your blog posts, just look on Google and you can easily find the relevant plugin that will easily do the job for you. Since WordPress is Open Source, thousands of developers have developed hundreds of thousands of plugins that you can use for free on your website. It’s fairly safe to say that if you can think of something you want, there is a plugin written for it. Not to copy the iPhone ads, but this could be the motto for WordPress – “There’s a plugin for that.”

Standards Compliant

WordPress is one software that follows all the Web Standards and keeps your blog or website compliant to all the rules that have to be followed when running a website.

SEO Friendly

Search Engines have to be definitely kept in mind when building a website. WordPress uses different functions which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example sending pings to other sites, making categories, tagging your posts, use of h1/h2 tags etc.

Large community Support

As per recent statistics, WordPress is used on more than 1% of the websites on the Internet in the world. There is a large user community backing the development of this software. So, whenever you face any problems, you can go through all the available WordPress forums and communities and find answers for all your questions.

So, you see the benefits of using WordPress now? And, you can add to this list by providing your feedback in the comments.

Conclusion

WordPress is hands-down the best free option for running a ministry website. We run New Media Ministry on WordPress and wouldn’t run it anywhere is. It is extremely flexible to suit any need you may have, very powerful yet insanely simple to install and use. Download a copy today and get started.