This site is created and maintained using DotNetNuke, a program built on Microsoft's ASP.NET framework. This program is free and is open-source, meaning that many people are working together to develop it.
To use this program, there is no software placed on your personal computer - it's all on the hosting server. This means, among many other things, that you can create and edit a site from any location, any computer, as long as you have access to Internet Explorer, Firefox, or similar internet browser. That also means that different people can edit the site from different locations, since there's no software needed, and there's no HTML to be created and then uploaded to the server.
Pages are created by adding "modules" into sections of the blank page. Modules are "plug-in" sections that have various capabilities and purposes. These modules and their content are edited individually. The advantage to this is that people can be allowed to edit text in modules (such as you see in the discussion forum) without being given the ability to change the page layout or module settings. Many modules are included with the program, and new "3rd party" modules are readily available either free or at low cost (like shareware). This site uses modules included with DotNetNuke, plus a few gathered elsewhere at no cost.
The overall appearance of DotNetNuke sites are also highly customizable through the use of "skins". This site, however, uses one of the included skins and is quite basic.
In order to use DotNetNuke, you have to have a webhost willing to allow this software on their server. Many hosts do not work with ASP.NET sites. However, a growing number do. This particular site is hosted by SeekDotNet at a cost of less than $10 per month. They even included free installation of DotNetNuke on the server for me. Obviously for that low price they don't do a lot of holding your hand and walking you through the process, but they do provide what they say, and do it well.
I include this information because I think that this type of website is perfect for churches and similar organizations. It's flexible, customizable, inexpensive, and is much easier to use than the .html editors like Fusion that I've used in the past. Yes, there is a bit to learn in order to create a site. It's not that it's difficult, but the controls are not always intuitive and it sometimes takes a while to find the location of the proper setting (much like many open-source programs). However, once the site is made, the rest is easy. If anyone is interested in exploring this as a possibility for your church's site, I'd be happy to give more information to you or answer how-to questions.
Chuck Miller - SVP webmaster