No matter how many small business eMarketing presentations I make, I always get a little scared when an attendee prefaces their question with, “I am looking to create a website for our church and. . . . “. So one might ask, are you afraid of church Derick? Not one bit. . .what I am affraid of are the demands that an organization such as a church can have on a website and how to recommend putting all of that together for a non-profit organization.
For years, WordPress has been my my default recommendation for blogs. It is slowly becoming my default recommendation for small business websites and non-profits. That is why when I came across the Church Theme from StudioPress, I smiled with relief as there was finally a theme that combined all of the flexibility of WordPress with the social media needs of a modern day congregation’s site and allowed the site owner to keep things under budget.
The Church Theme from StudioPress
The Church Theme from StudioPress comes with a rather contemporary and youthful color scheme. For the right church, this could be ready to install; yet, I view the theme more as a great starting point for customization. StudioPress theme customization requires some knowledge of CSS and access to tools like PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements. If you are a church or a non-profit looking to create a new website that has content management features and social media functionality, this theme can be given to a member of your congregation with the right skills or a local web developer to customize and make into a theme that matches your church. If given to a third party developer, one should expect to pay between $500 and $1500 for customizations. If looking for skills within the congregation, anyone with some comfort in WordPress and CSS should be able to get the job done.
Though the Church Theme from StudioPress is not for all out of the box, it is a great starting point for getting a dynamic website for supporting the needs of a church congregation.
