Hosting for your Website

The diocese offers website hosting to all parishes, congregations, religious communities and Christian organisations associated with the Diocese of Portsmouth.

For a church website there are a few things you need to do:

1. Firstly decide how you want to set things up. There are two options.

a) DIY with a knowledgeable person in the parish. If you choose this option the diocese is happy to offer website hosting and email forwarding at a cost of £50 per year. For the technically minded PHP, MySQL and CGI are all available if needed. This costs the registering and renewal of a domain name for your own website. e.g. www.yourchurch.org.uk For more information contact the Diocesan Webmaster: webmaster@portsmouth.anglican.org

b) The diocesan solution is to offer the same technology that is behind our own diocesan website (called Typo 3) to parishes. This solution is entirely web based and needs no prior knowledge of software, website design or web technology. It is extremely powerful and allows multiple individuals within a parish or organisation to update their own part of the website. The cost of this is £75 per year which includes the registering and renewal of a domain name for your own website. e.g. www.yourchurch.org.uk and email forwarding. For more informaiton on this option contact the diocesan Webmaster: webmaster@portsmouth.anglican.org

If you choose (b) above then:

2. Get the OK from the PCC.

At this stage it is also worth considering what content you want on the site. Time spent before you start actually creating web pages is repaid by a better site and less time wasted by having to re-do things. Who is the website for? Is it an outreach to those who do not attend yet, or information to those who do? Also decide who will update parts of the website. The diocesan solution means that anyone who can access the internet can update the site.

At this stage it is worth looking at other parish websites to see what they are doing. A good way of doing this is to look at the Ecclesiastical Insurance best website winners who are listed at: http://www.gazette.cofe.anglican.org/articles/02_12_page10.html

Parishes using the diocesan solution include:
St Thomas Elson
St Pauls Sarisbury Green

3. Decide on a domain name.

This is your internet address and needs to be:

a) Easy to remember

b) Descriptive of the parish and location

c) As short as possible (longer names can easily be misspelt)

d) It must still be available. There are many different places to check availability. One well known one is: http://www.123-reg.co.uk/

e) All parish websites that are registered through the Diocese have the suffix .org.uk to show a charitable organisation based in the UK.

4. Give the go ahead.

Our webmaster will then arrange:

a) For the diocesan office to contact you about payment

b) To register the domain name

c) To set up the web space

5. You are now ready to go but it is worth considering the following:

a) To give the parish a start we are happy to set up the first few pages for you. For this we will need the text of the pages supplied in electronic format together with any pictures again supplied electronically. If you don't have a readymade web person in the parish we would strongly recommend this as it is a lot easier to develop something that is already started.

b) We are happy to give you some initial training to get you going. This should include all those you will want to have an involvement in editing the site.

c) Think about email addresses. Each one will need to be re-directed to an existing email account that you have set up. e.g. vicar@yourchurch.org.uk can be re-directed to you@youremailaddress.com.

We hope this informaiton is of help to parishes and organisations within the diocese. If you want to know more, or need help, please contact our webmaster: webmaster@portsmouth.anglican.org