Igneous Quill

Originally posted on the Igneous Quill Xanga blog.

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Recently I set up a simple, inexpensive website for the Igreja de Cristo em Newark.  This is the church my family has been part of since moving to New Jersey in 2005.  Using Google's blogger platform, a free template and just $10 for the domain name we've got an active site that should keep folks informed.  Add to that the links to our Orkut and Facebook forums and I'd say we should be able to stay connected fairly well.  At least, those of us who actually use the Internet.

I've noticed over the years that churches have two bad habits when it comes to websites: static sites and floater sites.

Static sites are what everyone considered the norm in the 1990s.  You set up a site, say what you want to say and leave it alone.  Maybe one a month or even once a quarter you update the info there.  That was fine when folks were on dial-up and the Internet was a novelty, but nowadays it's unacceptable.  A website that never or rarely changes gives the impression that the organization behind it is as inactive as the site.

Floater sites are those lost cybersouls left adrift online when the person who set it up either died or simply moved on.  With churches this can be an all-too-common reality.  No one can access or change the site, so it just stays out there, visible to search engines and the traffic it brings, but unchanging (unless the host shuts it down).

Using blogger resolves both these concerns.  There is a handful of people with author privileges, so updates should be no problem.  At least two of us are admins, so if something happens to one, the other should be able to carry on and add new admins and writers.

Besides all that, the price is just too good.  $10 a year and no hosting fee is perfect for a non-profit organization on a shoestring budget.