Creating a website for your church can actually be fairly easy and inexpensive.  There are a lot of great tools available to make building a website doable, even for people who have no clue how to build a website.

Does your church need a website?

A church website can be very helpful for your church members and for possible visitors.  It is easy and cheap, so why not provide the extra source of information for people?

What should the website include?

A church website should have a few basic items:

• Directions to your church
• Service times
• Statement of what you believe
• Church calendar of events

There is a lot of other information you can include, but those are probably the biggest things people will be looking for on your church website. 

How to build a church website

There are several ways to create a church website, some can be very expensive (like hiring a web design firm) and some are free.  We are going to focus on the free methods. 

Website building tool provided by a host:

Most hosts will provide free website building software.  This software will make it easy to build a website with very little computer knowledge and they will usually include the tools you need.  The main problem with these tools is they often tie you into that host and it would be difficult or impossible to move your website to another host if you needed to.

Free content management software:

Content Management Software (CMS) used to cost 10s of thousands of dollars, but now there are several free, open source options that are very powerful and give you a lot of options.  Our favorite is Drupal, which is used for PastorSolutions.com.  Using Drupal or another CMS may take a little more work, but it will be far more customizable and there are hundreds of free tools (called modules) that you can add on to improve the site.  Using a tool like Drupal will give you much more flexibility and it can still be very easy to maintain and update.

Costs

The costs for setting up a website can be minimal.  For around $60 per year you can get decent hosting for your website.  See webdesignandwebhosting.com for a list of hosts with prices and reviews.  If you use a free tool and do the website yourself or find a volunteer, then your total cost will just be the hosting.