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Foursquare WordPress Theme

By The Foursquare Church

The Foursquare Church has released a free WordPress theme to help local churches build their own websites. The theme is designed to give Foursquare churches a website that looks and feels like Foursquare.org without spending the time and money to create one from scratch.

Websites can be difficult to build and manage. Unless you or someone on your staff has a background in design and programming—as well as the time to do it—the best option is often to hire someone to build your church's website. This new theme removes some of the time and expense from the equation to give Foursquare churches a fully functional and working website.

The theme is built for WordPress, an online publishing tool that allows you to write and edit content on your website. It's free to download and simple to install for those with some programming knowledge. Investing as little as five minutes for installing WordPress and another hour for setting up the Foursquare theme will result in a brand-new website for a church of any size.

The theme includes the ability to showcase your church's service times and current sermon series. You can offer a blog from your pastor, a place for visitors, and show photos from your recent event.

Design and Features

The Foursquare theme was designed using the Foursquare Style Guide, which outlines the official design standards of The Foursquare Church. The theme comes packaged with a copy of the Foursquare logo, background textures and fonts used by the style guide for an appearance that is consistent with Foursquare.org. In addition, there are several key features, including a rotating homepage banner, a contact form and a tabbed box next to the homepage banner. All of these features are fully customizable.

Requirements

If WordPress is the engine that powers your website, imagine this theme as the layer of design on top of it. You will need to download and install WordPress to use this theme as well as purchase a host to store it all online. There are many hosts you can use, but Bluehost and Dreamhost are two excellent ones that have a helpful one-click WordPress installation feature and run as little as $84 per year. This often includes the cost of your own domain (e.g., www.yourchurchname.com).

Using this theme will also require that you or someone you know has at least a basic understanding of HTML and CSS as well as a general familiarity with how to use WordPress. You can learn more about using WordPress on their support page. 

How to Use This Theme

The theme comes with complete, step-by-step instructions for installation and setting up the initial content. If you have further questions about how to get started, open the "Read Me" file in the package or e-mail us if you discover any bugs with the theme.

The theme is designed to get you up and running with a new website, and it is very flexible and can be customized to meet your needs. By downloading the theme, you will have access to all the code, fonts, icons and images, and can modify them as you want, given you have a background in HTML and CSS. The package also includes the layered Photoshop files used to create the theme.

Please note: The Foursquare Church is not able to offer technical support for your church's website, or for this WordPress theme. However, WordPress has an active online community and often answers can be found by performing a search. You can also visit the WordPress support page. Your church will also be responsible for purchasing its own hosting and keeping content up to date on your new website.

How to Get the Theme

The Foursquare WordPress theme is completely free. To get it, fill out a short survey, and you'll be given access to download the file.