Experience.FellowshipOne.com

We are looking to take our website to new heights.

What church websites and web technologies do you think are the cutting edge best sites, best technologies that lie ahead?
 

Check out  http://www.churchbeauty.com/ for a great list.

Here's one near and dear to us with an awesome site --> http://www.gatewaypeople.com/

Technology?  Check out http://www.lightcastmedia.com/

Curtis, interesting sites to look at.  Definitely have to tag a couple of those for looking at later.

I am wondering about the viability of using a CMS such as Joomla!, Mambo, or WEC (TYPO3) for building a church website and giving some of the maintenance of the content to ministry/team leaders.  My biggest concern is for the smaller churches who don't have a full-time (or even part time) IT staff to handle updates to the website.

Probably a better question to start with is "How do you plan to use your website to extend, enhance, or assist with your church's ministry?"  While cutting-edge technology can be really cool, it doesn't do much if it's just to be cool.  I'm really interested to see how the church can bring people together the way that blogs invite comments/discussion and the way that MySpace seems to have worked for social networks.

Would it make sense for the various teams/small groups to maintain sections of the church website or perhaps even spin-offs of the church website where they can post what they're doing with videos, articles, discussions, photos, etc?  I can see that a lot of interaction could take place and you could even have different levels of interaction - guests can only see so much, registered users could see a bit more, people you've identified as members/participants could get still more access and leaders could have most control over their areas.

I guess what I'm seeing in the future for the church is interaction.  I'd love to see what people are doing in that area, especially if they're somewhat successful in engaging people.

In Him,

-Peter

Peter,

  Your points are great. In essence we are looking to create a true internet campus in line with what www.lifechurch.tv is doing. A meeting and gathering place online that is an extension of our physical campuses. It will be used to enhance all that we are doing and agument other marketing pieces like our TV show, print pieces, etc. We are looking for audio video streaming, podcasting, blogs, forums, ministry teams. We do want all of our ministry teams to be able to author content for their respective areas but be able to have some central control as editors to ensure consistency in the ministry.

 www.convio.com is one of the engines we have been looking at. We also use fellowship one. We want all our options..
 

Been a long time since I looked at this post, but I wanted to share my experiences so far.  I installed Joomla (including the 1.5 beta) and was just not having a lot of success configuring things the way I wanted them to go for a church site.  Some of the positives I saw were the wide support for plugins and even the availability of some Windows apps that could post to it. On the downside, they have a relatively limited security model.  There are 3rd party plugins to help that to some extent, but they either had a cost associated or were incredibly hard to configure.

I finally downloaded the starter pack from the Web Empowered Church site and was able to get a basic church site up and running within an hour or two.  I found some shortcomings there - my local Windows box didn't support some features well or I was missing an option enabled in my web server.  However, once I tweaked those and restarted the server, I still had a working site in < 2 hours.  Of course, wanting to tweak things and bring in some other neat tools, I browsed the TYPO3 extensions and some of the newer offerings from the WEC team that were not in the starter kit and played around with those.  My longest times were spent figuring out how to tweak something (often resolved by actually reading the docs or a forum post).

I should also point out that Irving Bible Church is using TYPO3 for their site and has it configured to tie in to F1 via WebLink.  (I hit one of their "Contact" links and was re-directed to an F1 form.  :-) )

Anyway, while our church is still evaluating our options, I'm definitely giving a positive review for the WEC package, especially for smaller churches who may not have a lot of time/talent/resources or who just want a decent site up and running with little pain.  I still can't speak much for or against the language underneath the product, but it's worth a look and a trial if anyone's evaluating their options for a church site.

-Pete