Living Open Source

Time for a new series of tutorials on how to blog your church with WordPress. We’ll start at the beginning and take one step at a time. I’ll keep it brief but if you get stuck or if I’m going too fast - shout through the comments section at the bottom of this post. The emphasis will be on using WordPress to run your church website, though the first few steps will pretty generic.

1. You don’t need to install anything to get started

If you have never used WordPress before, the best place to start is to register and get an account at WordPress.com. Here you can be blogging with WordPress in seconds and you don’t have to install anything. With this free service you can have a play with the WordPress software and write your first post (We’ll talk about posts in the next tutorial).

For now register and choose a good username - the name of your church would be a good idea. Then login and write your first post.

Many churches are using this solution to run their site, though most do at least take the next small step…

2. Getting smarter - Using a domain name

If you use wordpress.com, the url for your blog will be http://yourchosenname.wordpress.com/. This is OK, but it is really easy to get your own domain name and point it at your wordpress.com blog.

If you don’t already have a domain name you can get one here.

Depending on the company you used to register your domain name you should be able to configure your domain to point at your wordpress.com account. This is usually called Web Forwarding. Enable forwarding of your domain to the url of your WordPress.com blog and everybody will think you were really smart..

3. Be Really Smart - Install WordPress on your domain

Of course there are some limitations to using WordPress.com. You can’t install additional plugins and themes and so in time you may want to install WordPress on your own hosting account. It isn’t actually all that hard either. It really does only take 5 minutes.

Many hosting companies now have an auto-install feature which means you don’t even have to do the install to run your own WordPress installation. Grab an account at BlueHost or EUKHOST both of which have an auto install WordPress option on their hosting packages.

But I do want to emphasis that you don’t need to host it yourself. Running with WordPress.com is the best way to start out, especially if your have never run your own domain before. You can at a later stage export all your blog posts and move them to your own installation (a possible subject for a future tutorial).

Where next?

Now you have WordPress in your hands, have a play and have fun - we’ll talk about posts and pages next. Back soon with the next instalment. If you can’t wait that long or need more info check out the official tutorials.

Happy blogging…