herein lies a template for a church web site

What is it?
When you click on the link below (on ENTER), it will take you into a "site" within www.diomaine.org that is meant to provide congregations with all they need to get up and running with a simple website.  You can navigate all around it to see if you like it and how all the pages fit together.   To personalize this site will take a good amount of typing or cutting and pasting to plug in your own information. 

Sure, it's nice, but how do we get it from the diocesan website to our church's/volunteer's/priest's computer?
One of two ways:
    1. Contact Communications Officer Heidi Shott at hshott@diomaine.org and she will email all the pages as attachments.  They can be opened in any number of user-friendly web design programs such as FrontPage or Netscape Composer. 

    2. If you have anyone in your congregation who is web savvy but doesn't have the time to spend fiddling around with site architecture, he or she can simply visit this web site and copy the source code from these pages to manipulate and customize into a site that works for your congregation.

Don't you need somewhere out in cyberspace to put this website?
There are a number of nearly free options for web hosting.  
    1. The Diocese of Maine has a good relationship with Great Works Internet in Biddeford, but they have recently changed their non-profit policy.  We are in the process of approaching them to see if our congregations can be grandfathered into the old policy which allowed churches to hook up at any time of the year, not just July 1.

    2. Another good option is www.geocities.com .  For free you can get one email address and a web site that is big enough for any one congregation's needs.   For a set-up fee of 15.00 and $8.95 a month you can get a personalized domain name (such as www.ourchurchinmaine.org ), five email accounts, and a mongo amount of web space.  They also offer a very simple file transfer system that allows you to upload your files from your computer onto your website while on the internet.  That way you don't need a separate software program to place your files up on the web.

Okay, but is there any back-up if  we get stuck?
Contact Communications Officer Heidi Shott at 1-800-244-6062 x33 or hshott@diomaine.org . She will be happy to help you out.

We've looked at the pages, and we don't need anything so thorough as all that.
Please remember that these are just a series of templates.  You can eliminate the links to any pages you don't need.  Use different background images, insert photos all over the place, and make it your own site!

ENTER
(no hope abandonment allowed)

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