I was just coming on here to share the link for Web-Empowered Church
(WEC)...
http://webempoweredchurch.com/
If you would like to see some examples, here is the church website
that pretty much helped invent WEC:
http://ginghamsburg.org/
I also like this site a lot:
http://www.stonebriar.org/
I am working with both Horne Memorial UMC in Clayton and Queen Street
UMC in Kinston to get WEC websites up and running. Both churches
decided to go with VineHosting.com for their hosting needs, because
Vine is a non-profit group out of Lake Junaluska that offers a turn-
key solution for Web-Empowered Church. (That means they do a lot of
the tough initial installation stuff for you!) Vine is also familiar
with the server requirements that WEC demands.
The WEC software runs on the TYPO3 (
http://www.typo3.com/) content
management system, which can look pretty complicated at first, but I
have found has AMAZING help files and resources!
I think the best selling point for using the Web-Empowered Church
software (other than being a very powerful tool which is FREE!) is
that it allows multiple people from the church to update very specific
sections of the website for which they are experts. For example,
instead of having everybody email web content to one webmaster, or
even worse, the church secretary, to update, each person can log in
using their own username and password and then see ONLY the sections
that they are allowed to update. So the president of the Methodist Men
can update the UMM page, the Children's Director can update the
children's page, and the Music Minister can update the choir schedule.
There can also be "admins" who are allowed to access all of it, or
anywhere in between. It's completely customizable.
WEC (as any content management system - CMS - would) also allows you
to change the template of your site, without changing the content. For
examples of this, see
http://templates.webempoweredchurch.org/ This
means that once you have created a website and entered all of the
content, as long as you keep using the WEC system, you can COMPLETELY
redo the look of your website without ever having to REDO your
website! I think that's simply amazing. The Ginghamsburg Church
website above has over 4,000 web pages of content on their site. That
would be nearly impossible to recreate. But using this system, they
could turn the whole site into yellow and pink polka dots at the snap
of a finger if they wanted, and all of their content would still be
there.
The Horne Memorial and Queen Street WEC sites are really not "public
ready" quite yet... both are just getting started, but I will be happy
to post the links here when they are closer to completion. Or you can
feel free to email me for the link and I'll send it to you if you'd
like to watch the works in progress.
I can also answer any more questions you have about WEC and what it's
been like to work with so far. There's a good resource book written by
Mark Stephenson, the guy from Ginghamsburg that pretty much invented
WEC. It's called "Web-Empower Your Church: Unleashing the Power of
Internet Ministry." (
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWeb-Empower-Your-Church-Unleashing-Internet%2Fdp%2F0687642841%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1222144164%26sr%3D8-1&tag=xangayensid4h-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
) I'm reading it now and so far it's a really good read for why your
church should consider focusing its Internet Ministry.