The WordPress Dream Theme Goes to Church
April 23, 2008 by 1Cat.biz
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A friend of mine who is the associate pastor at a local church recently had an assessment done of his church’s website. The church had a static HTML site that he updated himself using Dream Weaver. When he got the assessment back he quickly realized that he was in over his head and needed help.
Some of the things that needed to be fixed other than the out-of-date design were; inconsistent fonts and colors, content scattered randomly throughout the site, poor navigation, and bad SEO. (Search Engine Optimization)
Another need they had was the ability for staff members to be able to login from any computer and change/update content without having to purchase and install additional software.
So, I set them up with Ben Cope’s WordPress Dream Theme and had Ben do a little customization for me. He made it so the featured article section, and the boxes below it on the Home Page, are populated by static pages instead of blog posts. I asked him to do this because, at least for now, most of the content on the site is static.
However, we did set up categories in the blog section that allow each pastor to have his own blog and they are PodCasting sermons and videos via the PodPress plug-in. This is something they were doing before from remote WordPress.com blogs. Now, everything runs seamless on one website.
They also plan on using the blog for news/announcements and to start conversations online that might interest those in their community. People who come to their site can now comment on the messages they listen to, as well as, any of the other blog posts. This gives them a unique way of communicating with their members and the community that a lot of churches have yet to take advantage of.
Another feature that I was particularly proud of is that I was able to use the cForms plug-in to create a multi-select email form on the staff page. Before they had every staff members email address listed on the staff page with an email link. In case you didn’t know, that’s VERY bad! Spammers can easily “harvest” email addresses from HTML code like that and once you’re on their lists you’ll never stop getting Spam.
Here’s the NEW Westland Baptist site…
Plug-ins Used:
- Akismet
- All in One SEO Pack
- cforms
- Dean’s FCKEditor For Wordpress
- FeedBurner FeedSmith
- Google Analytics
- Google XML Sitemaps
- My Category Order
- My Link Order
- My Page Order
- podPress
- ShareThis
Theme Used:
I don’t just recommend the WordPress Dream Theme because I’m an affiliate or because Ben is a good friend of mine. I recommend it because it works well and it truly is the easiest and fastest way to get up and running with a custom, premium WordPress theme.
Barry, you continue to be a leader in wordpress website design. I checked out the Westland site and what you achieve in website design is top class. I keep coming back to 1cat.biz for ideas and information and you exceed my expectations each time in what you provide to your readers. Keep up the great content!
David,
Thanks for the kind words. What can I say I love WordPress and the potential it has for both design and marketing.
If you liked the Westland church site wait until you see the next site I’m going to launch this week.
Barry O.
[...] The WordPress Dream Theme Goes to Church… [...]
I too was amazed at what Barry was able to do with the Westland site using the WordPress Dream Theme! I never imagined that my “magazine-style” theme could be used to create such a professional looking static website.
Ben Cope’s last blog post..Hottest New Premiere Wordpress Theme Goes on Sale!
Hey Barry. I love that church site, its an amazing example of how to use wordpress as a CMS.
I would love to leave joomla for wordpress as a cms, but i struggle with having a lot of pages and a proper menu system.
It seems this is
Did you use an plugin for the church menu or was it all custom work?
Jason Frovichs last blog post..Wrath of the Lich King News, Sunwell Progress and Goodbye to Death and Taxes
Jason,
I just used the WordPress Dream Theme and the My Page Order plug-in.
Barry O.
So maybe the theme allows drop down menus?
If so i must get it.
Thanks
Jason Frovichs last blog post..Wrath of the Lich King News, Sunwell Progress and Goodbye to Death and Taxes
Yes. The WordPress Dream Theme automatically creates drop down menus from your pages and sub pages. You can then use the My Page Order plug-in to easily set the order of the pages / sub-pages.
Barry O.