Embedding a Slide Show in Your Church Website

Slide shows are a great way to add a personal touch to your church website. Pictures of events, and outings can help people feel the atmosphere and culture of your church in a way that words alone don’t convey.

If you’re using wordpress.com to host your website, you have three basic options for embedding slide shows into your site: slide.com, RockYou, and Slideshare.

With each of these you can select the photos you want to include in your slide show and then embed the code from the slideshow into your page or post. (You cannot currently embed slide shows in your sidebars).

Do not use the <embed> tag code, since this is disabled on wordpress.com. Look for the custom WordPress code enclosed in the square brackets [ ].

For example on slideshare the code would be found here:

For more information check out wordpress.com’s article “Can I Have a SlideShow?“

Unfortunately, due to security concerns Picasa slideshows (and flash content from countless other sites) are not available on WordPress.com at this time. There is a workaround for this but that will have to be a future post.

10 Best Church WordPress Themes?

Living Open Source Has a list of what they consider the 10 best WordPress themes for church websites.

Check ‘em out!

Why Use WordPress For Your Church Website?

Church Communications Pro has a great article on why you should use WordPress to run your church’s website.

In summary they are:

1. It’s a free content management system
2. It’s easy to use
3. The search engine love it
4. There are thousands of free templates available
5. You’re in control of it

I heartily agree. I’ve been using WordPress for years and recently tried my hand at church website creation using WordPress. Not too shabby for a site that’s totally free.

Blogging A Devotional with WordPress

Have a daily or weekly devotional that you’re written? Want to make it easy for people to read it online? RSS and Scheduled Posts are the answer!

Let’s look at setting up an RSS feed using WordPress…

Wikipedia defines RSS as “family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format.” Simply put, it’s a way to broadcast out your posts, so that people can subscribe to them and view them via an application like Google Reader.

Thankfully, setting up an RSS feed in WordPress is simple. Many themes (like this one for example) come with RSS feed links already built in. If not, simply create a link to “http://yourblog.wordpress.com/feed/” with the title “RSS Feed.” You can also include this graphic, the commonly recognized symbol for RSS:

Now that we’ve got our feed set up, let’s work on scheduling some content.

To set a post to display in the future, just change the post date. One the rights side of your “Write Post” window, you’ll see this box:

Click the “Edit Button” and use the fields to set the date the article should display.

That’s all there is to it!

Using this simple techinque you can load a years worth of devotionals, sermon notes, or just about anything else into a blog and have it show up right when you want to.

For examples of blogs already using this technique see the following:
Morning and Evening
Checkbook of Faith by CH Spurgeon.