This Church Web Master series of articles is here to help you start your own church website.  In our first article we talked out the different options available for starting your blog.  From this point forward we will assume that you have a domain name and a web host and are using WordPress as your site software.  We are setting up a site called Key West Vineyard Community Church as an example site.  The site looks like this:

This is the standard Kubrik theme that comes with WordPress.  One of the nice things about WordPress is that there are a lot of avaialble themes to change the way your website looks.  Many themes are avaialble for free.  If you want to get fancy you can buy a premium theme for $50 - $150 dollars or you can even have a custom theme developed for $300 - $1000.  To find a theme for our example site I did a Google search for Church WordPress Themes.  I found a site on page 1 called livingos.com which had some nice free themes for WordPress.  I downloaded two of them.  The first one looks like this:

It’s OK but I liked the second one better.  Here is the theme we are going to develop for our example site:

This theme has a nice scrolling feature which I think will  make a positive impression when people visit the site.  You want a theme that will catch people’s attention, and yet you don’t want it to look to cluttered.  We also want to get the most important information we want to convey right on our first page.  People may not go any deeper into your site so we want to make sure the theme we choose allows us to get our main information (what we do, when we meet, where we are, how to get contact us) right into people’s faces when they come to the site.

In order to develop your church website with WordPress you are going to have to learn how to download and upload files.  I want to encourage you to read a series of articles I wrote on how to create a blog at www.mynewbieblog.com.  Go to the My Newbie Blog site and read the articles called 50 Things To Do to Start a Blog from Scratch - Parts 1,2, & 3.  Once you read these the articles you will be familiar enough with the basics to continue setting up your church website.  My Newbie Blog is filled with useful information about most of the topics you will need to master in starting your own church website.  We will continue working on our example site in our next article in the series.