The importance of a well-designed and functional church website is well documented, but we know that getting a new website can be a daunting (not to mention pricey) task. With that in mind, we’ve compiled this list of church website design providers that offer quality website solutions for ministries with limited budgets. Whether you’re looking for a basic template design or a fully custom website and a content management system (CM S), the following companies have you covered.
Note: Some of the companies mentioned in this article are past or current COLLIDE advertisers and some are not. We did our best to be objective and unbiased in this article in hopes that we could help you discover the church website solution that’s right for you.
Church Media Group
www.churchmedia.cc
The name Church Media Group may not be familiar to many of you, but their work most likely is. In fact, our website, collidemagazine.com, was built by the Church Media Group team. Church Media Group is a full service creative agency that offers web development and hosting, brand identity, consulting, and e-commerce solutions, among other things. These professionals will work hard to design a site that fits your needs and is easy to manage. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out their ministry website archive, www.ministrycss.com.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, hosting, e-commerce, brand identity, and more.
Type: Custom
Starting Price: $3,000
Church Plant Media
www.churchplantmedia.com
Church Plant Media is all about informing, connecting, engaging, and empowering your congregation through its web solutions. Furthermore, Church Plant Media says it considers churches as partners in ministry, not clients. Churches can choose from one of Church Plant Media’s pre-design styles or get a completely custom design. Their CMS offers multimedia integration, blogs, calendars, unlimited pages, and much more. Church Plant Media also understands that planting a church is neither easy nor cheap, so they offer $1,000 discounts to small church plants.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, and hosting
Type: Pre-designed and custom
Starting Price: $1,900 (church plant) or $2,900 (existing church)
Clover
www.cloversites.com
Clover creates elegantly designed websites that are easy to manage. Clover takes all the hassle and headache out of the process by using a simple template format. Each of the 20 templates is beautifully designed and easily customizable using their intuitive Greenhouse CMS. Every Clover site offers full multimedia integration, search engine optimization, and customer support. At only $1,000, a Clover site is perfect for a church with a small budget looking for big results.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, and hosting
Type: Customizable templates
Starting Price: $1,000
Collision Media
www.collisionmedia.tv
In addition to having a great name, Collision Media is a creative design studio that offers quality web and graphic design, photography, and video services for churches. Their website solutions range from basic template designs to custom sites. Collision’s CMS provides the user with many powerful tools including multimedia content, WYSIWYG editing, e-commerce, blogs, and calendars. They also offer branding packages and other add-ons for those in need of a complete organizational facelift.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, hosting, print design, video, and photography
Type: Customizable templates and custom
Starting Price: $499
faithHighway
www.faithhighway.com
As one of the leaders in church media solutions, faithHighway specializes in custom church websites, television commercials, logo design, and awardwinning media centers. Through consultations with their web experts, faith- Highway offers custom church website design tailored to your church’s vision and mission. Other faithHighway tools include Sermon Connect, e-commerce, calendars, and search engine marketing.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, hosting, design services, Sermon Connect, Ignite CRM, direct mail, and TV commercials
Type: Custom
Starting Price: $1,000
FaithNetwork
www.faithnetwork.com
FaithNetwork desires to use every medium to its maximum potential in order to reach people for Christ. Specifically, FaithNetwork provides custom website solutions for ministries. Simply choose one of their three packages (Silver, Gold, or Platinum) and their experts will guide you through the rest of the design process. Each FaithNetwork site offers professional design, simple administrative tools, customer support, and stable hosting. Additional options include multimedia support, e-commerce, and a social networking engine.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, and hosting
Type: Semi-custom and custom
Starting Price: $1,699
Monk Development
www.monkdevelopment.com
Monk Development offers full web solutions for churches, from their design network to their Ekklesia 360 CMS to their Cobblestone Community Network. Clients have the choice of designing the site themselves, using a pre-designed template, or having one of Monk Development’s design partners (such as AM Design—www.amdesign.com) design the site. Once designed, users can edit their website’s content using the easy-to-use Ekklesia 360 CMS. Other services offered through Ekklesia 360 include event management, Cobblestone Community Network, The Cloud Network, an e-mail newsletter tool, a blogging platform, and multimedia and social media integration.
Services offered: Website design, CMS, hosting, and Cobblestone Community Network
Type: Customizable templates and custom
Starting Price: $1,999
Do-It-Yourself Options:
For those of you with some basic design and coding skills, you can likely save some money by building a site yourself. Even if you’re not sure what CSS stands for (it’s Cascading Style Sheets, by the way), you can probably teach yourself enough through online tutorials and trial-and-error to make one of these do-it-yourself options work.
WordPress
www.wordpress.org
WordPress offers users the ability to design sites powered by their popular
CMS. While WordPress is best known as a blogging platform, it’s a viable alternative for free custom websites. All you need is web hosting via a company such as Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com) or Media Temple (www.mediatemple.com), the newest version of WordPress installed on your server, and some CSS/ HTML knowledge. For users that need help along the way, wordpress.org offers step-by-step instructions, a Getting Started guide, a directory of downloadable themes and plugins, a robust user community, and design tips.
Type: Customizable templates and custom
Starting Price: Free
iWeb ‘09
www.apple.com/ilife/iweb
As a part of iLife ‘09 (which comes with every new Mac), iWeb ‘09 facilitates basic website functionality for a fraction of the price of a full service website provider. Choose from one of many Appledesigned themes, then select an editable page template such as Welcome, About Me, or Photo Album. A user can easily customize a site’s look and feel, add widgets such as YouTube or Google Maps, and even add HTML code snippets. Once a site is designed, the user can simply publish it to the Web using a MobileMe account.
Type: Customizable templates
Starting Price: $79 for iLife ($99/yr for a MobileMe account)