Building Catholic Parish/Organization Websites

About a year ago, I built a website for the Religious Formation Office at St. Ronald Catholic Church in Clinton Township, Michigan. When planning out the website in August 2008, my plan was to just a get a domain name so that we could post pictures and videos there from the events that we hold throughout the year.

After going through the "legal" hoops of it, consulting with our Parish Council, and getting final approval to take the website live, we had a website. The site went live in January 2009, we were only getting about 50-100 visitors a month, so bandwidth usage was not as high as I expected it to be. I built the website in Drupal using a customized copy of the "AboutPeople" theme on 6.x, because I liked the rotating header at the top of each page.

Now, over one year later, the website for St. Ronald Catholic Church is now a Drupal website. Both of these Drupal websites are hosted on a multi-site installation of Drupal 6.15 on a Dell 1750 server, running 32-bit CentOS 5.

If you ever get into developing a website for a church, here are a few suggestions.

1. Have a lot of patience! Before anything was built, I spent 3 months planning everything out on paper because I didn't want to have to do any major changes once the site was built.
2. To go along with #1 above, make sure you have your Content Types chosen out beforehand. At first I started out with the basics- Page, News Item, Ministry, and Individual (get rid of the Story Type!). When we were halfway through development, I decided to add several others- Bulletin, Bulletin Articles, Sermon, Podcast, Video, and several others - which added about 2 weeks worth of time to my work. Be prepared to make changes!

MORE INFORMATION COMING SOON!
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