Once you make the decision to move ahead and build or update your church website, you need to choose the platform you will build it with. What are your choices and how will you make the decisions you are faced with? Here's a look at a baker's dozen of top content management systems and how they compare for church websites and how should you evaluate them.

One of the first features you will want to consider carefully for your church or ministry site is the ability to accept prayer requests. People everywhere have joys and concerns they can offer in prayer and your web site can be part of their prayer lives. The web offers global availability - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But, it will be up to you to connect with those people and their prayers.

Every web master needs a basic understanding of how the web works. Educate yourself about the fundamentals of Apache, PHP and MySQL and you will have a much easier time managing your site and a lot less frustration in maintaining it. The aim here is to introduce some of the common concepts of the three primary web applications supporting your web site.

Having a web strategy for your church is really a part of having a communications strategy for you church - your website is just one aspect of all your communications media. Even your web strategy will be broken into several components - a website, possibly a Facebook page and a Twitter account, maybe other online channels like YouTube and MySpace.

There are many pieces to your web strategy, but just having all the pieces doesn't mean they all fit together - yet!

Just like shaking the box won't assemble the jigsaw puzzle for you, you need to have a picture of how it will all fit together and then take steps to make it all happen. Today, we'll look at the pieces and the steps in the context of an overall strategy.

What do you know about Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut, MyChurch and other social networking sites? Do you know how to leverage these sites in your ministry? We'll take a quick look at what they are, why they are significant to your church web presence and how to connect with others using these Internet applications.

The last thing you want is an ineffective web site. Your church web site must share your story and connect with your intended audience. To do this, you must determine who will build it and maintain it and what tools and resources they will need.

You also need to know what to look for when evaluating possible platforms for your church web site. Have a clear set of requirements ready as you look for your solution for an effective web site.

Search engines and users rely on you to provide information about your site's content - leverage your XOOPS meta tags and begin to improve your position on search engine results page (SERPs)

If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get lost. And, you'll see a lot of new places!

Setting goals is all about knowing where you're going and knowing when you arrive. We all have heard about S.M.A.R.T. goals - now is the time to put them work. Goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. Let's see how that applies to our church website and the strategy you are developing.

This addition to Church Websites 101 will step away from the technology for a bit, because this is actually more difficult to master than the technology.

When technology works - it's great. When it doesn't, life can be miserable. God had Noah build the ark. He also had Joseph store up grain for the famine. What preparations have you made for the ups and downs you'll experience?

Point. Click, Type, Click. Drag, Drop. Share. Take a fresh look at your website - it might be easy, but it ain't simple! The number of easy-to-use site building and publishing tools is climbing, but the task of building and maintaining a good website is not getting any simpler. Until now.

The concepts are easily learned and, with proper discipline, you can have an effective, enjoyable website for your church.