And that’s where the support forum comes in handy for those who get creative when reading instruction manuals. We just need to make sure there’s enough people linked up to the forums to offer some help.

use multi-user wordpress

wp-mu if set up properly should work like the following site

http://www.lockergnome.com

all of the blogs are then streamed to the homepage of this site.

each individual site if you click on a few from the homepage are setup with the same basic functionality and then they can tweak the theme a bit with a header and background etc.

here are 2 examples from that network
http://www.lockergnome.com/leftystrat
http://www.lockergnome.com/creedence

they wrecked their themes a bit but you should be able to get the point…

My suggestion would be to set up a very nicely designed theme and allow people to customize it a bit themselves. You provide all the widgets/web 2.0 stuff prepackaged.

Also, you can either charge $5 a month for this service or even $1 or you can throw your adsense on their. With some coding you could do a 50/50 revenue share with the owners of individual blogs. This way when traffic from the homepage is driven to particular articles and people click on ads.. you can generate revenue and so does the author.

It would be reciprocal… the more popular the site gets the more each author can make and individual blogs could thrive directly which could in turn promote the site as a whole and other blogs/youth groups/programs.

However, I do like this idea a lot: http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2008/12/open-source-advocacyopen-source-youth-ministry/

I’m in this with open arms!

I love this.

With the economy tanking, youth leaders beyond the urban environment might also find your creativity a way to sustain strong ministry while the board cuts their budgets.

I will pass this on to my students.

Actually my idea isn’t low cost; it’s no cost. (I think; please correct me if there are hidden costs I’m missing.)

Do you think open sourcing strategies for developing youth ministry websites is worth the energy? Particular youth ministries might decide to incur costs (domain purchases, dedicated servers, hiring someone to customize the strategy), but at the end of the day such costs would be optional. The point is to gameplan a no-co$t/high reward option for youth ministries without a budget and then identify low-cost alternatives for groups with minimal budgets.

Thanks for helping me/us think this through.

I think it’s a good idea, but for it to work you would have to have a crazy low cost structure. The ideal person for this would be a over achieving urban teen, or someone who wants to use this as an entry into Web design/development.

Basically what you are talking about is doing a Web equivalent of a lot of the low cost urban graphics designers. The name of the game is high volume and low cost. You can see an example at: http://www.nexgraphix.com/home.html. Most of these companies focus on low cost print, so there is a lot of room for low-cost websites.

I think the more challenging part is knowing what content to provide, and realizing how often one has to update the profile or website. This is where people need a lil’ coaching to say here’s what you can type out and/or say, and to make an update once a week or more often.