Parish Website Advice

[Nick Baty]

Not quite liturgy – although connected – so am hoping the mods will allow this: Am presuming there are a few parish webmasters on here, so am hoping one of you can offer a little advice.

In short, we need a parish website and I'm wondering what to use. My own website (Concept Music) uses RapidWeaver which is great for my needs – but it lives on my desktop and, every time an item is added, the whole lot (dozens of pdfs) has to be uploaded again. On the plus side, the host (Little Oak) does allow me to set up any number of email addresses – something like that would be great for the parish where everyone from the PP to the flower arrangers could then be contacted.

So, perhaps we need a live website, like WordPress or Wix. Does anybody use either of these? Do they allow the creation of email addresses (although we could get round this) and is it possible to have more than one administrator?

All thoughts welcome. And Happy New Year one and all.

[oopsorganist]

Wel,l that is so 2018!
Some people communicate via Facebook..... I just complained about the ivy and brambles in a local CofE graveyard and (that sounds so weird) and got a message straight back. You can set up a group on Facebook.
Mobile phones are the way of the future. The Jesus App.

[Nick Baty]

Most website programmes automatically format for mobile devices.

[Becky]

Happy new year!

We built a new Parish site last year using Weebly. It's an online editor and very easy, WYSIWYG, drag and drop editing. There is a free version but we wanted to use our own URL and couldn't on the free plan so upgraded to their Starter plan, which is still very cheap and also removes their branding. Multiple admins are no problem.

We did quite a lot of playing around with various platforms (from memory: WordPress; ParishPal; ParishPortal - a company our Diocese has worked with to help parishes out; eCatholicWebsites and others) and Weebly ticked the most boxes for us.

There is email functionality but we're not using it. We left that and other things with our DNS registrar/previous web host and simply changed the A Record to redirect web traffic - I seem to recall that Weebly can't administer .co.uk domains so moving everything wasn't an option for us; just changing the A Record was very simple, and almost instant. We did most of the building on a free Weebly subdomain and didn't move the site or start paying Weebly until we were nearly ready to go live.

It won't suit everyone, I know: there are limitations that might annoy people used to the freedom of coding their own sites; there's no way to roll back to a previous version if you accidentally delete content and the editor is occasionally fiddly but that's rare, and essentially we're very happy with it. The support, both official support and the community forums, has been very good.

http://www.strichardschichester.co.uk

[Nick Baty]

Thank you for that, Becky. I hadn't considered Weebly so will certainly take a look.