I get questions all the time about whether or not to use Wordpress or Blogger or Google Sites or Facebook as a main website. The answer for most of the questions is NO!!! The exception (sometimes) is Wordpress, which can be configured to be more than a blog. But that's not always done, which leaves it as about the same thing as Blogger, which is still better than Facebook. The point is that you SHOULD blog, write, update, and interact, but there's not really a perfect website that can accomplish all of this.

Facebook and Twitter are like thought streams. They can engage people, but the home pages are usually just filled with more thought streams, then advertising, and eventually kittens. People don't take Facebook profiles seriously as a church website, so don't try to convince yourself that it's OK. Luckily, Twitter barely has a profile at all, so people don't try to use it as a homepage. Social media sites are not quite blogging, but the initial results are similar enough that a lot of churches might feel they platforms work just fine.

Blogger is made for blogging, and it's cheap (as in free) and easy (as in done). That's because it's not much more than a news feed with some frames around it. And it works fine for blogging, thus the name. When you blog, add links to your real homepage. Blog websites can look OK, but it's not easy to create much more than a single news flow and a few semi-homely pages. I use them to sell items, ideas, and ads.

Wordpress works great out of the box for blogging, but it can be expanded to also be a main website. Like Joomla (which I use) and other CMS platforms. However, a lot of churches never quite get to the point where the rest of the website is developed, leaving the main website as a kind of single-category blog, which is then nearly as bad as Facebook, and therefore not worth the extra effort over Blogger. Conversely, I've seen many Wordpress sites WITHOUT a blog at all. Just static pages. When that happens, you're wasting what Wordpress can do with blogging.

Old Google Sites was decent at blogging, but you only had one choice for ordering (alphabetical). New Google Sites is OK at pages. Neither one does both like a decent CMS. And they're hard to use. Free, but still.

Anyhow, if you want to blog because you have an important opinion, set up a separate page dedicated to it. Link back and forth often, and make sure your main church site still has updated content, like news.

Brave New Church can help with a blog, a blog in a full website, or many other tech updates you might need. We like to embed Facebook and Youtube on the website, which means it really does become the one place people need to go, even if you have to update in a few places.