How to Maintain a Youth Ministry Website With Minimal Effort Using a Blog

Youth Ministry Website Example

I created this example youth ministry website because of a pressing need I keep encountering: Helping individual ministries (including Sunday School classes and small groups) create and maintain their own Websites with minimal effort.

In other words, I needed a solution that wouldn’t require me to do all the maintainence — a site solution each ministry could be responsible for, but would require as little effort and Web geek knowledge as humanly possible.

Enter the simple and humble blog.

I believe almost any ministry area could use blogging technology to keep simple, up-to-date websites while helping foster community and communication.

But here are my main reasons for suggesting individual ministry areas use blogs to keep their ministry-specific sites going:

  • It’s easy
  • It’s easy
  • It’s easy

Seriously, in most cases where I have advised people, they lack the training and tools to do Website maintenance.

Blogging platforms, like Blogger and WordPress, are essentially content management systems. In other words, they are neat, customized software — chiseled to effeciency by the millions of people who use them — to be well-honed, online-based ways to manage Websites.

I’ll put it this way … if you can operate Microsoft Word, you can easily use Blogger for a ministry site like this.

Now, some of you might be thinking, I don’t want to use a “blog” simply because it’s a “blog.” Maybe you have negative stereotypes associated with it, or you think it’s amateurish.

Well, then don’t call it a blog!

Call it your ministry Website or whatever. It’s just the infrastructure for easily maintaining a Website! Frankly, unless you call it a “blog,” or someone has knowledge of what blogs usually look like, they probably aren’t going to know … or care!

9 reasons to using a blog (blogging platform, actually) to run a specific ministry website:

  1. Updating is easy. Blogs are designed naturally to put the most current content at the top. And handy archives give your users access to previous posts they missed.
  2. Podcasting is super-easy — See my tutorial on Sermon Podcasting Made Super Easy with blogs.
  3. Keeping your ministry participants updated via email is automatic (using FeedBlitz) — Just make a post about an upcoming event, or important topic and they’ll get it once a day in their inbox.
  4. It’s cheap or better yet FREE – If you want to use Blogger’s free hosting you can, or simply use their FTP Publishing (how I did this example site) on your church or ministry domain.
  5. It’s interactive — By allowing comments, you can let your ministry participants weigh in on your sermon, or the praises they’ve had this week, etc. Take polls, do surveys, ask questions.
  6. It’s viral — This simply means that it’s ripe for being spread among a lot of people. Posts can be emailed to friends.
  7. You can collaborate with others — You don’t have to do it by yourself. With Blogger, you can invite other trusted “authors” to help write your content and keep your site updated.
  8. It’s perfect for search engine optimization – Blogs are great ways to maximize your exposure in the search engines.
  9. There are a ton of free templates to customize – You don’t have to go with the default templates provided … customize them like I did with a simple graphical header.

See all the posts in the Building Rockin’ Church Websites series here.

December 5, 2006 · Filed Under Blogging, Church Media, Rockin' Web Sites, Web Site Design

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4 Responses to “How to Maintain a Youth Ministry Website With Minimal Effort Using a Blog”

  1. matt on December 5th, 2006 7:51 pm

    Good stuff as always Cory. We recently have been coming up with a plan for building custom word press themes for ministries to use blogs as the cheap way out. Blog themes will become one of the services we offer.

  2. Cory Miller on December 5th, 2006 8:12 pm

    Matt, let me know when you do as I’d love to announce it here.

    I’m lovin’ WordPress and see so many advantages to using it for a free content management system.

  3. Tim on December 6th, 2006 10:41 am

    I highly recommend Subdreamer as a CMS for creating youth group websites. Granted, it’s not free and it’s not quite as user-friendly as Wordpress to setup, but has all the tools you need for creating a community-based website for youth. Check out my youth group site for an example: http://www.redeemercrew.com.

  4. Jeff on March 1st, 2007 8:33 am

    A couple of the kids in my youth group suggested I check out this site. It looks like it might be a easy and affordable way for me and my kids to stay connected. Just thought I’d pass this info along. We all know how challenging it is to stay connected to our youth.

    http://demo.oikosconsole.com

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