A Brand New WordPress Theme for Congregations

September 7, 2011

I’m delighted to announce Faith 2012, a new WordPress theme designed with the needs of congregations in mind. WordPress has become the most popular web content management system in the world and my hope is that this theme will make it even easier for congregations to jump into WordPress and take full advantage of its powerful options.

Two things in particular make Faith 2012 well-suited to congregations. First, is the look. Not only is the tone geared to churches, synagogs, mosques, temples, etc., it’s easy to adapt by using your own photos in the the headers and changing the background. Second, the information architecture and menus are structured based on what I’ve learned from working with congregations over the years — and they too are very flexible.

In addition, unlike the majority of WordPress themes I’ve seen, search engine optimization is baked into the code in areas such as the the title and header tags. It surprises me how uncommon this is. My best guess is the worlds of WordPress developers and marketers don’t overlap that much. That said, the themes that come pre-installed with WordPress have excellent Google juice.

This has been a dream of mine and in the pipelines for almost a year. It began last November when I was approached by a sister congregation, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bowling Green. We were in accord that many, many congregations need help with their websites, and they were open to my idea of developing a theme for them and then adapting it for the larger world. My heartfelt thanks goes to them for their support.

So today, at last, I release it into the Web stream. The Faith 2012 site includes some documentation and examples, as well as download links. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have questions or suggestions.

Posted in: Church Websites, WordPress