Looking for some suggestions on standing up a new church website for a new church plant.
We’ve used Church Plant Media at our sending church for many years, but seems kinda pricey, and I don’t really like their current CMS page editor interface.
I’ve read a bit about Wix, Squarespace, WordPress. Not sure if there are better options out there.
Not looking to stand up online giving or any “members only” section. Just wanting a place for typical information about our church, who we are, gathering times, and sermon audio. An integrated blog and sermon audio hosting is a plus, but not critical. May just look into using sermonaudio.com if hosting on the site doesn’t make sense, and link to a substack for blog.
Our church uses squarespace, it’s pretty easy to set up and has generally good features. I think it’s particularly good for those less technically minded. From my experience it leans hard into templates, which means if the template doesn’t do what you want it can be a bit of a pain to work with, but the templates also offer guardrails.
Jason, we’ve used Squarespace at Trinity for a number of years. Works well. As for audio, we’ve used Podbean for a long time. SermonAudio was insanely expensive last I checked, and I seriously dislike their interface.
@adionne, I notice that in addition to using Podbean, you also publish sermon audio on Substack. What is your opinion of Substack’s audio hosting features? Do you think it would be viable in the near term (until we get a proper website stood up) for us to just post sermons to a Substack? I imagine it isn’t tailored to archival and searchability, but maybe a free option short term?
I do upload an audio file of my sermons to Substack for “distribution.” Substack’s audio features are quite limited and, unlike podcast hosting sites [Podbean or Transistor (used by OOOM)], will not provide all the tools for organizing, sharing, formatting, and feed automation for podcast apps (Apple Podcast, etc). But, perhaps you don’t need those things. If you have a targeted audience, and they know where to get your audio, you can keep it simple.
Up in the UP, we use Sermon Audio because we qualified for a church planting deal with Amicus Ministries that will pay for Sermon Audio for a year for us. It is 60$ a month after that. I like the ease of upload and the interface for it.
I have some reservations to some of its reporting because in our first month its recorded 2500 plays of our sermons and I don’t trust that number.
I ended up using Wix’s “Light” package, for $17/mo. Allows only 2GB storage. No eCommerce support, which I don’t want, and I don’t need much space since I am not using it to host media.
Using Podbean’s “Unlimited Audio” plan. Only 1GB/upload per month, and audio-only. Perfectly acceptable for sermon audio only. Another $17/mo. ($12 if annual).
Paid less than $8 to register domain for a year via Porkbun.
Another $9/mo. for a single Google Workspace user.
Free Substack for blogs, etc.
Total annual web spend of about $520. I am pretty happy with that.
