Boyd wants to know. He wrote this past week, “Many missionaries and appointees want something more significant than a blog, such as a personal website that is interactive. For example, you put a prayer letter on-line with a response coupon. You want people to fill out the coupon and have it come back to you. Or have your website link to your mission for donations and more.” In his opinion, most programs are too expensive. Friends have pointed him to solutions like RapidWeaver (Mac only, $50, supposedly easy and intuitive). His max is $300. Where would you send him? He also says he wants “to avoid a significant learning curve (like DreamWeaver).” Would you recommend …
http://www.squarespace.com ???
http://www.wordpress.org ??? (to download & install the files) or…
http://www.wordpress.com ??? (to host them on WordPress servers)
Something else?
Also, a couple of Boyd’s friends are looking to develop a web-hosting solution specifically for missionaries. What components would you like to see in it? Please click “comment” below and give your opinion. Thanks in advance for any input you can offer.
Hostgator. 4.95 a month for all you can eat bandwidth.
There are a lot of web hosting options and the competition is driving the costs down and down. I would think the best service to develop for missionaries is a web development service. I think that the effort required to build a web site and install it on a host can really be a time drain to be avoided by field workers. Better to say what you want the site to look like and accomplish. We don’t encourage them to build their own automobiles do we?
As a webmaster of four sites I know the time drain caused by the temptation to tweak just a little or to try to learn and apply something novel just because it’s “easy” to do with a personal computer.
Rather than building a tool for Boyd to use to build his web site it would be a greater service to build and maintain the site for him, freeing his time for his primary function while allowing technology to support him to the fullest
http://hostek.com/christian-web-hosting.asp
I’ve been using this company for about a year now and they are great!
I suggest two tools. For $10 a month, you can have a video suite of tools, which includes 200 editable, rebrandable templates and unlimited hosting. But also, video email, video autoresponder, video conferencing and more.
We receive several thousand dollars each month using this system to teach Christians LIVE worldwide.
For $40 a month, you can add additional space AND create email lists, mass emailings and more.
http://www.ComF5.com/EddieSmith
We have used Google Sites for a few years with great success. It is so easy to setup – it took us about 2 hours to setup a site for a church we serve.
You can register a domain and link that so that anyone seeking your site will be redirected to the google site.
Works great and the only thing to arrange is to register your domain. The rest is all plain sailing.
I like wix.com It’s free but has ads for itself unless you pay about $12 a month. It does everything your inquirer wants to do and more. Has lots of online video tutorials and the support is great.
As for a site for M’s, I suggest Google Apps. It’s free for nonprofits, has email, Google Docs, several layers of privacy and security, and multiple subdomains with templates. No need to reinvent the wheel!
We just setup this site on BlueHost.com ($60 a year) and bought a WordPress template for a one time fee of $60. It was fairly easy to setup and maintain.
What ever you use, realize that it could be there for a long time, and people you might not want to know some things about you can read it too.
When we started into our missions training I used a free service to put up a little information about our family and what we were doing. A couple years later, when it became obvious that God was asking us to move to a ‘creative access’ country, I realized we didn’t want this information on the web. It took a while to get the ‘free’ web page changed because the service was no longer available, but the web pages were still up and couldn’t be changed…. Not a fun situation to be in.
So think twice before you post anything to the internet, especially about someone else that works overseas.