# Sermon posting on website



## Poimen (Nov 14, 2012)

I would like to pick the brain of the Puritanboard community as it seems I have exhausted my own abilities/resources in trying to improve our sermon posting on our website.

We use a wordpress platform, with which I am fairly satisfied (especially since hosting is free). It does have some formatting issues, as the 'options' are limited. Most of my issues, however, are with our sermon page: Sermons | Grace Reformed Church of Leduc (We use podbean to upload our sermons). 

Currently I simply copy and paste a Word file into the page and it works 'okay' but it is getting unwieldy. So any suggestions on improving our formatting would be appreciated. What I really need a neater and more streamlined way of organizing our sermons. I am thinking of just having the sermon series on this page, as too many sermons on one page tends to be too distracting. 

Any suggestions?


----------



## Backwoods Presbyterian (Nov 14, 2012)

I use https://www.box.com/ to upload things and then put a link on our page with the name of the folder all the files are in on box.com

You can go to our website (www.ellisvillepres.org) and click on the Sermon tab to see what that looks like for us.


----------



## bug (Nov 14, 2012)

I have a seperate 'tile' for

1- Morning service
2 -Evening service
3 - Bible study
4 - Specials

I store around 6 months of messages on each, but only about 8 are displayed. Each tile has a scroll bar. It's not perfect but it is quick and easy. 

salemsermons


----------



## Romans922 (Nov 14, 2012)

This is what I do on my Scripture reading/expositions (outside of the sermons), you can check it out at the bottom of the page: http://www.cpc-kc.org/p/sermons.html

So when a book is completed I just post the links into a blog post and link to that post and then on the 'sermon' page I put "Joshua" for instance. And you hit the link and it goes to the blog post on all the Joshua expositions. 

It doesn't appear as though you go through books of the Bible completely like I do (that's fine, just noticing) so it can become hard to do what I'm saying. Maybe you could (if you went my way) put the past 5 weeks of sermons on the main page (10 sermons), and then put a section below that on:

PAST SERMONS

Exodus
Deuternomy
Mark


etc.

Also, putting the dates will congest it up. I might just skip the AM/PM part and put 9-10-12 or something. And only put who preached if it was someone other than you.

For sermons, putting them on sermonaudio has helped a lot, I recommend it if you can.


----------



## jwithnell (Nov 14, 2012)

I was looking around too when building our website and liked how Sermon Browser worked -- I believe it is a plug-in and works with Wordpress but not with the platform we are using. Here is an example at a website.


----------



## Edward (Nov 14, 2012)

I would suggest organizing other than by date, except for most recent - By scripture might be more useful. We used to organize by Scripture and by speaker, although it looks like we index by date and time of service as well now.


----------



## JonathanHunt (Nov 15, 2012)

You have the same template as our church website, Daniel.

Are you wordpress.org or wordpress.com? I have not been able to embed anything using .com


----------



## Poimen (Nov 15, 2012)

Jonathan:

We are wordpress.com. And yes, nothing seems to embed in this site. Sermon Browser, for example, is a wordpress.org add-on so it doesn't work on our site. 

But all of you have given me some ideas about how to proceed. Thank you.


----------



## Semper Fidelis (Nov 15, 2012)

See Hope of Christ Church, Stafford, VA

I disagree with much of what has been offered in terms of a choice between organization by date or by topic. It's a both/and and not an either/or. I think sermons need to be accessible by date first but you need to have something that permits people to sort by series as well.

If you had a wordpress.org site I would have a recommendation but, since your platform is pretty limiting, I would rely on Podbean to display your sermons on your site. Have you looked in to the embedding options of Podbean toward that end? Instead of creating a manual entry every time there is a sermon you could create a page that embeds the Podbean thing that allows people to see most recent sermons and also sort by series.

Another option is to create a new post for every sermon, embed the podbean player into that post and then categorize the posts by the Sermon series.


----------



## JonathanHunt (Nov 15, 2012)

Daniel, as we have the same (free) wordpress base, how do you get your sermon page looking so good? Ours is very basic, but my sermons are on sermonaudio so they're just links to the offsite sermons. I occasionally host sermons on the site by visiting preachers, though.


----------



## fredtgreco (Nov 15, 2012)

Let me just say one other thing along with Rich. A church is not really doing itself any favors by having a free limited website. You can get a Wordpress.org site for about $50 per year (maybe less - those are hosting fees). For about $1000 plus $500 per year, you can get a professionally designed easy to manage CMS site (like from Church Plant Media). 

I think you get (in large measure) what you pay for. It does not even make fiscal sense. If through a good website, you gain one tithing family every 3-4 years, you have paid for the cost. And you also have a much greater presence and ministry throughout the world.


----------



## JonathanHunt (Nov 15, 2012)

fredtgreco said:


> Let me just say one other thing along with Rich. A church is not really doing itself any favors by having a free limited website. You can get a Wordpress.org site for about $50 per year (maybe less - those are hosting fees). For about $1000 plus $500 per year, you can get a professionally designed easy to manage CMS site (like from Church Plant Media).
> 
> I think you get (in large measure) what you pay for. It does not even make fiscal sense. If through a good website, you gain one tithing family every 3-4 years, you have paid for the cost. And you also have a much greater presence and ministry throughout the world.



I'm certainly considering going to wordpress.org... but does a church need to spend thousands to 'have a much greater presence'? My experience shows something different. I know of many churches here in the UK with nicely professionally designed little websites who get virtually no traffic. We get plenty just by using wordpress, facebook, twitter, etc.


----------



## fredtgreco (Nov 15, 2012)

JonathanHunt said:


> fredtgreco said:
> 
> 
> > Let me just say one other thing along with Rich. A church is not really doing itself any favors by having a free limited website. You can get a Wordpress.org site for about $50 per year (maybe less - those are hosting fees). For about $1000 plus $500 per year, you can get a professionally designed easy to manage CMS site (like from Church Plant Media).
> ...


I don't think you need to spend thousands. Church Plant Media is $1000 to set up (and often they will discount) and then $50/month after that.


----------



## Semper Fidelis (Nov 15, 2012)

I host many Churches for free. I'm happy to host your site as a Wordpress.org site Daniel. I use the Podpress plugin on ours and it is great.

The Wordpress theme we use is only $30 but I subscribe to the service to have access to all the themes to help set up others.


----------



## Semper Fidelis (Nov 15, 2012)

By the way, although the cost is about $30/month, Sermon Audio more than pays for itself for us. It is another source (beside our site) that people find us through.


----------



## Poimen (Nov 20, 2012)

Thank you for the offer Rich, but I am fairly pleased with the way our website is at this point. But if we update it in the future, I may take up your offer.


----------

