AWA -- Website Ownership

Like Building A House


Building a website is a lot like building a house
Architect	We need to settle on a set of house plans before we can get down to serious business on a new house. There are books full of house plans and there are thousands of website templates available at a very nominal price. You can hire an architect to draw up a set of house plans and you can do much the same for a website if you want a really good professional looking design. The website architect need not be the person who builds the site. If you do hire a website architect (i.e. designer), it is important that you have a pretty good idea what you want before you do so. If you play the roll of architect, then draw up what you want on paper or you can use Power Point, which is how this site was sketched initially. Use what ever approach works best for you.
Contractor	When building a website, it is typical that the architect and contractor are the same person. It need not be that way. The person who is good at coding up the website may not be much of an artist.
Living In It	Church websites and houses are not worth much unless we live them. Somebody has to take out the garbage to keep the website cleaned up. Somebody has to bring home the groceries to keep the site current and up to date. The lawn needs mowing, the house needs painting and the website needs many of the same things done to it. We don't go live in the local hotel once the house has been built, we move in and live in it. So, don't forget that if you hire somebody or a company to design and build your website that the local folks are going to end up living in it or abandoning it. The design must be simple enough for your church webmaster to take on. Or the content management system must be something the church office can happily work with. Even if you sign up for services that do everything for you, somebody or a team at the church needs to be calling out the necessary changes. Otherwise you can have a grand looking house, with all the lights on, but obviously nobody lives there.
Some of the alternatives that are available
Hosting Services	There are people who host a website from their home computer. This can work fine for the occasional visitor. The performance will be divided among the visitors, depending on how many are visiting at once. Do it yourself hosting is not a good idea, especially for a church or ministry. Hosting services put your site on the web with high bandwidth connections to the internet to keep up with all the traffic that you hope will be arriving on your site. Free hosting services are notorious for their slow bandwidth.
Hosting A Domain	Refer to the article on Domains? to help decide if you need one. Generally you can get a domain listing from the same company that will host your site or from a domain registry. The domain typically costs about $15. One reason why a domain hosted service costs more is all the extra features bundled with it.
Website Builder	Several hosting services, including TAGnet, offer Website Builder which makes it possible to build a website without knowing HTML, PHP or what ever. This is the opening statement offered in TAGnet's description: An easy to use website building tool! No software to install. Nothing to configure. Start building your web site right away using simply your web browser.
Content Management	With Content Management facilitates your church office can keep the website up to date without any of them knowing anything about website design. News stories can be added and deleted, an on line calendar kept up to date as well as many other remotely accessed features. This makes it possible to keep the site reasonably up to date without having to know HTML. Content managed systems are becoming more common. TAGnet offers the service. Be sure and look into Simple Updates.
Valet Service	TAGnet Valet offers website design and maintenance as well as a staff of website designers to make updates on a regular basis. This service is especially for those who know little or nothing about website design.