Web Hosting for Churches of Christ
The primary free service offered at CofCpages.org is free web hosting for congregations. This service is designed to be easy to use and requires no prior web development experience. The service is intended for congregations to build a web site that informs the public of their location, post materials, and eventually offer features to the brethren that assemble with them. You may read on for more information, or sign up now.
Free
In case what was has been said already is not clear, this service is FREE for churches of Christ. The low cost of maintaining this site will be covered by the developer of this site.
Another important note about the service is that there will be no advertising banners. Such banners can sometimes contain content that congregations might not want to appear on their web site. Yes, there are some banner services that are church-oriented, but in order for those banners to be useful (ie: they pay the people that own the site, us, for using them), they are trying to sell a product, and the point of this site is not to generate income nor support any church generating income, even if they are just advertising (1 Cor 16:1-2). At the moment the only added link to your site will be a small text link saying that you are using this service, and for users to click to learn more.
Ease of Use
This web site will be designed so that it will be extremely easy for users to update their congregations's site. To edit an article, one simply uses a form to upload a file directly, or e-mail it to me and I can convert it for you.
I will admit it: I am a computer scientist, and sometimes what is easy for me is not easy for others. I will have a link on every page that will allow anyone (a visitor to the site, the site administrator, one of the members, etc.) to contact me directly and say "I think it is hard to do this ______, it would be nice if it could be done this way _______". I want this site to be simple enough that those with very little computer experience can maintain a web site here. If you want to go ahead and fill out one of these forms, please go to the suggestions page.
Because of all of this, some of the more common methods of web site editing are not available, namely direct access to the site via FTP or similar means. If you want to upload an article or other file, that will be done directly through your web browser. If you are more of a "traditional" webmaster, this service might not be for you. It is here for those who have little to no experience designing a web site. On a similar note, if you have already designed a site in some program (FrontPage, Publisher, Dreamweaver, etc.), CofCPages cannot host the pages you have made in that program.
Design Philosophy
It might be helpful for you to know some of the reasons this site is designed the way it is. Many times, when one sets out to design a web site, special attention is given to the graphical design of the site. For those of us in the web industry, it is easy to use graphic artists to design professional layouts, while those who are just tinkering with designing a site usually don't pay too much attetion to this. However, some who are just starting to develop a web site place many flashy graphics on the web site, which tend to distract from the real content of the site. The problem with both of these approaches is the focus on design, and not on content.
This service is here to provide content for churches of Christ. That is to say, the focus is on the articles, contact information, and other information that is important for congregations to publish. Though this service is here to help congregations establish a web presence, it is here to provide an avenue for evangelism for these congregations. With that in mind, administrator of congregational sites, will have very limited control over the graphical design of the site. There are a few design templates available, a few places where images can be added, but that is about it. This has been done so that congregations can focus on actual content, not graphical "fluff".
Finally, I want to reiterate that there will be no graphical advertisements on the site. The only ads that will be displayed are text-only ads that won't change, that point to the company that is generously giving me free hosting. The problem with graphical ads is you sometimes have very little control over them. For example, a brother provided me with a link to a congregation's homepage at Yahoo!, which had an advertisement of a barely covered woman on the side of their page.
It is my hope that those who use this site will be able to successfully list information about their local assembly, as well as provide materials that fellow Christians will find useful. It is also my hope that congregations will be able to post materials that will be used to save the lost. In my experience over the last few years, the congregations that I have assembled with we have brought in many and set up studies with souls that found them on the web, and I hope that congregations using this system will have similar success.