I’ve been considering stepping up to answer a request that my church has put out asking for help revamping/rejuvenating their website. I’d normally never consider myself any kind of option when it comes to web design, but given my relative success with this site… let’s just say I’m considering it.

The first problem with the church’s current site as it stands is that there is no one in charge of site maintenance/management. As best as I can tell, the site’s creation date is sometime in the year 2000 and has seen minimal alteration since then. It’s a static html website with exactly one picture and a “Microsoft Frontpage” banner in the corner… [shudder].

Upon further investigation, however, I was able to discern that the server that hosts this, shall we say, elderly page is not some dusty old Win9x box sitting in the cellar of the church, but rather, an up-to-date Apache server! And perhaps more importantly, it has PHP installed:

Now we’re talking my language! But WordPress, while it makes a great blog site, doesn’t exactly sound like it’ll fit the needs of a church.

A friend of mine just recently mentioned Joomla, as a great choice for website content management. I’ve done a test install and my initial reactions are very positive. It seems Joomla has the “front page” feature that is absent from WordPress (by design, mind you). Also, don’t confuse my term “front page” with the disabling enabling software from Microsoft…

The “killer feature” of Joomla as a content management system (CMS) for the church is the fact that once the page is in place, the page content can be managed my someone else‘someone whose job is to update resources meant for broadcasting current events and announcements.

With the encouraging results from dabbling in the Joomla software, I envision a new site that is easy for the church staff, volunteers and possibly even the pastors to use to communicate with current and future church members.

I’ll post back here any further developments (if there are any) on this thread of an idea.