Introduction

In my GitBook Church Website and Marketing on a Budget, I documented my experience of Project Managing a modern new website, marketing materials, and marketing plan for a small church. Anytime possible, the project utilized low-cost options and pre-existing resources. Ultimately, I chose to host the new website through Squarespace, at $96/year, including the cost of a custom domain. I felt that Squarespace offered the best value for money for the church's situation, including beautiful, modern templates that would ensure a unique look, and an intuitive content management system that could potentially be used by non-techies and occasional volunteers, in order to keep the content relevant. After this project was complete, Squarespace raised its price to $144/year. The church continues to pay $96/year, but could be impacted in the future.

A more advanced, but cheaper option exists: self-hosting. In this GitBook, I will show how, with a bit of expert knowledge, a church can self-host a website comparable to the Squarespace website, but for only the cost of the custom domain (~$10).

Using one design, I will demonstrate two "back-end" approaches:

• A Jekyll site hosted for free on GitHub with updates made directly through GitHub as a dashboard or Jekyll CMS
• A Django site with code stored on GitHub, but deployed via Heroku, with updates made through an admin dashboard

See the end of this GitBook for a few other free or low-cost options.