Creating a Church Web Site Tutorial
Chapter 9: Getting your site hosted
There are numerous options
for getting your Web site hosted (which means placing it on
a computer that is a part of the Internet). Believe it or not,
some of them are even free. Your options include:
“Free” Web hosting services.
With most “free” web
hosting services, advertisements will be displayed on your
site over which you have no control. To be free of the ads,
you must upgrade to a paid service. Some of these services
include downloadable software or online editing which you can
use to create your site. Others allow you to upload sites created
with your own software. Some examples of these services are
Yahoo's
geocities.com and Lycos' tripod.com.
Happily, there are two exceptions to the “free means
ads” rule: The UCC
Webmedley program offers free,
one-page Web sites to UCC churches with no ads; and the
American Bible
Society’s forministry.com service
offers multi-page Web sites with no ads. With forministry.com,
you use pre-designed
templates (which are professional and attractive) and online
editing tools to design and manage your site. UCC Webmedley
also offers a paid service for sites that are more than
one
page, and offers for-fee design services.
Paid, commercial Internet Service Providers.
If your church already has paid email service (AOL, Earthlink,
Comcast), there
is a good chance that hosting for a small Web site is included
in the package. You should check with your provider to see
what they offer. With a paid service, you can design your Web
site from scratch with a program like Microsoft FrontPage
(described in the next chapter), or in some cases they will
provide you
with downloadable software or online editing tools. If you
use FrontPage, you need to make sure your provider supports “FrontPage
extensions.”
If your church's email provider does not have web hosting
included, there are inexpensive options out there that you
can use. For
more information, read the Lycos Webmonkey article “Web
Hosting for Under 10 Bucks.”
If your church doesn't have email, check out our document
on "Choosing an Internet Service Provider."
Domain names
No matter who hosts your Web site, you will probably want
to have an easy-to-remember domain name for your church (such
as www.yourchurch.org). This will usually cost $35 a year.
Your Internet provider or web hosting service may be able to
register a domain name for you. Or, if you are using free web
hosting, you can still register for a domain name and have
traffic "re-directed" to your free site using a re-direct
service. One such service is yournamefree.com.
Next: Chapter 10: Software
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