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Building Bethel’s Blog

Building Bethel’s Blog

Building the blog and internet outreach is a work of faith When volunteering for helping redo or build another website, there wasn’t the inkling of where it would lead to. During deep quiet prayer, the phrase “my people perish for a lack of knowledge” hit like a hammer- and, during the week, the same phrase kept coming back to mind. So, it was a case of “OK Lord, what do you want me to do about it?”…around the same time, we were blessed by the  gift of a new computer,  Word given in sermon to the effect of using that computer for the Lord- and several other indicators.

It was agreed that if the Lord was in it, things would be given to support it, or else it would be free. An over-riding facet unanimously agreed on was that the Word of the Lord should be free- for everyone. The blog, and supporting sites built, are focused on those ideals in mind.

Choosing Wordpress

So how does a church go about getting a blog? Wordpress has been by far one of the easiest, with several widgets and other functions.Its drawback is that at the totally free level, without buying a hosting name, it is limited: you cannot post audio and video, storage is minimal- and, most annoyingly, it will not allow javascripts and certain HTML on its site. It is still recommended: its ease of use,  scheduling options, lay out and other factors outweigh the disadvantages- and…if certain things are needed, it is possible to find a website that can do those things.

Getting an email account

Before signing up for the wordpress blog we had to have an email for the wordpress account, and also choose a name. Names of sites ideally should reflect the email, and are best if less than 16-20 letters long. The length limit is because some sites limit the length of username or site-address names.

We chose Gmail for the following reasons: you automatically get a YouTube account (video hosting) it comes with its own calendar functions; it is simple to sign in to Blogger to get a secondary blog; it ties in with all of google’s services; online file hosting can also be arranged through Googledrive.Gmail also has a useful video/voice chat feature.

Through Gmail you can sign up to Google Plus…which has a good suite of functions- for example, you can build a community page, arrange contacts into “circles” for sharing, you have your own page with status updates, where you can post video, and other digital media; and there is google hangouts- which allows live video.

So, in one email we have practically a whole web-suite.

At the current time of posting we are still consolidating our websites and have not fully developed our Gmail outreach.

 

Throughout the blog, various 3^rd party and offsite resources will be listed.

Setting up wordpress

Choosing user name and site name should be done from the start; check on google that no-one has the name already; and use a site registry to check if the name is available. Yoyu should choose something under 16-20 characters long for most websites and URLs and which reflects your church/ business etc.

GMAIL

It is recommended that you get a Gmail account. SIGN UP TO GMAIL HERE

Sign up will ask you for: Christian name, surname; your USERNAME@gmail ...

password, confirm password, gender, birthday, mobile phone, current e-mail, and ask you to complete a captcha, enter your location and also to confirm you agreed and read the terms...

also have ready a profile photo.

LINK to WORDPRESS SIGN UP

Choosing a template: choose any simple template it can easily be changed.here is one that is popular

 

Choosing widgets:

Widgets are useful extras that do things, like show your twitter tweets, add a calendar etc...

Decide what you want and how your blog can look...

Wordpress.com is limited and will not allow embeds or javascripting for site security reasons.

However it can still do a lot!!!.

we decided to go with wordpress.com as it has a lot of functionality, and we could upgrade later

.... more to follow later.