WordPress for Ministry
If you read in our About Us page, you’ll see and understand my passion for online ministry through the internet.
If you are non techie and want to learn how to build a website for your ministry, I’ll try to help you with with this. I’m not (yet), so called expert, but I have some knowledge and would like to share with you. And it’s free advise and consult! 
, you can contact me through our Contact Us page. This way I can fulfill my purpose to serve, by empowering others to do online ministry.
One way to do online ministry is by writing article and share it online, we call it blog. You can blog in many ways like uploading simple text file, html file, or using a blogging software/platform.
Why we need a blogging software/platform?
A blogging software will help user with flexibility, standardization, easier customization, etc. The good news is there are many free blogging platforms! For now I’ll focus on a platform called WordPress.
WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins andthemes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”
Why WordPress?
For more than 2 years, I’ve tried several famous platform namely is Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress. So far, WordPress is the best to suit me and let me mention again, its Free . Some advantages of WordPress compared to other platforms:
1. Update Services
Believe me, this service is handy and very helpful. The first thing you want to do when you setup your website is marketing and announcement. And the great thing about this, it’s a built in ‘announcement’ in WordPress platform.
Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!
2. It’s light and fast
When using blogging software, your article is stored in databases and populated by coding (for wordpress it used php) to serve to your reader. Compared to Joomla, WordPress platform provides faster query and serve output to your audience. Likely this is because WordPress is mature enough (since 2003) so it’s code is greatly optimized.
3. Powerful free plugins
Plugins are add-on feature that make your website perform better and powerful for your audience. Every blogging software have this feature. There are free and paid plugins. The best in WordPress is it has wide range of powerful plugins and most of them are free! Other platform may have great plugins as well, but most likely their good plugins are paid version.
4. Easy to use
Best way to start is start with the easy one, and so far WordPress is very easy to use. It has installation wizard and one click update/install. This makes development from simple blog to powerful blog a breeze.
5. Search engine friendly
The goal for online ministry is reach out as many audience as we can, worldwide. With so many website on the internet, how can you bring audience to your website? One good way (and chance) is through search. WordPress is search engine friendly, so by default, you can assure the platform itself help you to be found through search engines.
