There are numerous ways to create a home page. We do not want to discourage you from using any method that you are comfortable with.
Shane Bazer wrote a good article for pastors about creating and advertising an effective web site. It's worth reading if you're creating or maintaining a web site.
ReligiousResources.org has created a good guide to creating web sites for religious organizations. It is very informative and well-written. If you are new to this process, it is worth reading.
For registering domain names, they prefer register.com. We prefer godaddy.com-- they're a little cheaper and offer good tools for managing your domain once you have it. They also offer very low-cost hosting which can be an advantage if you're not planning to use the WCG hosting service.
I've recently become aware of www.1and1.com, which offeres even cheaper domain registration than godaddy.com. Of course, when it comes to registering the name, it's your choice. You should use a registrar that you trust and are comfortable with.
If you plan to use our hosting service, please set the name servers to ns1.dreamhost.com, ns2.dreamhost.com and ns3.dreamhost.com when you register the domain name. Doing so will reduce the time it takes for hosting to become active.
We provide free web site hosting for any Worldwide Church of God congregation, camp, office or ministry that wants it. Due to our reduced manpower, we can't provide assistance for creating or maintaining local church web sites. We can and do provide space to host the sites. If you wish to use our service, you may either:
You can use our domain name, where your URL will look like http://city-st.wcgweb.org/, or you can purchase your own domain name and we can host it for you. We can also provide a limited number of e-mail accounts for any site we host.
NVU is a decent free html web page editor. It doesn't handle .asp scripting at all, but for normal web pages, it's a good free tool. FTP is part of the program, so you just define your site in NVU and you can see all the files and folders, open them and edit them. www.nvu.com. Kompozer advertises itself as the unofficial bug-fix version of NVU. You may prefer to have additional features and fixes. www.kompozer.net.
FileZilla is now my favorite FTP program. If your web design tool doesn't support FTP directly or you need to regularly upload large media files, you may benefit from having a good FTP program. filezilla.sourceforge.net.
To get started on our server, fill out the application form, or write to webmaster@wcg.org with your name, e-mail address, church location & name.
Detailed information about our service:
Our sites are hosted at DreamHost (www.dreamhost.com). You can get a variety of information from their web site including information about what features are available. You do not have access to the control panel so anything that requires that, you'll need to request from webmaster@wcg.org. Also, please note that you are not their customer, but ours, so any questions about service should be routed through webmaster@wcg.org and not sent to their support e-mail. However, you may feel free to use their forums for general assistance if you're inclined to do that.
CGI scripting (Perl and PHP) is enabled by default on all sites except those with FrontPage Extensions. CGI applications can be placed in any folder on the site. DreamHost provides some free standard CGI scripts, that you can use whether or not CGI is enabled for your site:
There are many other free places to create a home page. If you're enthused about one, please let us know so we can list it here. It may help someone else find the right place for their home page.
If you choose to create a local church home page on a service other than ours, please write to webmaster@wcg.organd inform him of the URL so it can be linked to from our index, or ask your pastor to update the web site address in the online system.
If you choose to create a local church home page on a service other than ours, please write to webmaster@wcg.org and inform him of the URL so it can be linked to from our index, or ask your pastor to update the web site address in the online system.
You can find inexpensive web hosting at places like www.godaddy.com, www.1and1.com, and www.webhosting.com.
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