Pilgrim Place

Welcome to Pilgrim Place, the official web site of Pilgrim Lutheran Church, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

It’s been a longer journey than we originally planned but we’ve finally gotten up our new web site–or at least the first stages in it.

We made a decision back in early summer to change the way we create our web site. We had used different tools to create it but it always came back to the same problem: by and large it was still a task that only one person could do. We decided we needed a way to have additional people put information into the site. That’s when we decided to move from a static site to one that uses a “Content Management System” (or CMS for short).

We tried a couple of different systems in our journey to a new site but continued to have problems getting them to do what we wanted them to do. I’m sure it wasn’t them but they didn’t just work out for us. We finally moved to a version of WordPress, a blogging software, that can be used as a CMS system as well. We found an interesting site that had information on how churches could make web sites using WordPress called Living Open Source. [In fact, we use a free template from them on our current site.]

WordPress allows us to make either static pages or blog entries. The items you see listed as “pages” (both on the top of the page and along the right side) are the only true pages on the site (okay, if you want to be technical we have a few others too). The rest are made up of web blog entries that the CMS places onto a template and makes into the page that is served to you, the end user. Pretty neat, actually.

We’ve finally come to WordPress since it does what we want it to do (yeah!), the price is right (free!), and there’s a large group of people who use and support it. In addition, its easy enough to enter information after the site been set up that we’ll be able to have other Pilgrims input information into it. This will take some of the pressure off of our web team to try to keep the information up to date.

We’re still working on getting everything in place but hope to have a majority of it updated by Christmas and get other people entering material after the start of the new year. However, it took us longer to get to this point so we may be delayed again. We hope not, however.

We hope you find the new site easy to use and filled with helpful information. If you find an unfinished area please be patient with us; we’re working to fill the holes.

Regards, in Christ,
PJKreft