Pleased to do so ....

The Diocesan site is hosted with HostPapa (Toronto).  Link at the bottom of our home page.  Price is right - about $5 per month.

I use Adobe Dreamweaver primarily for design and maintenance but its high end and not at all necessary for basic needs.  There are several numerous free options available ... WordPress, Kompozer, Joomla etc ...  Of course the real "costs" for web sites are discipline and time - ie maintenance, planning, editing,  gathering and the flow of information.  $$ costs are non-existent and really not an issue these days.

Another relatively recent option you might want to seriously explore is Google Sites.  Built-in editing capability, design templates, free hosting and space and you can, in fact, use your current domain name if you wish.

I hope that helps.

I am part of a committee in our parish tasked with reviewing our communications needs. This includes website design and functionality. In exploring Parish websites, I found the Fredericton Diocesan website very appealing.

Would you mind providing more information regarding the hosting, design, costs and maintenance of your website. I would like to propose to our vestry a similar design.

The diocesan web site has just (week of 10 March 2008) been changed to a new web hosting service.  We were finding with the web applications we were running (WebCalendar, PHPList, FormTools and this forum) the database connection was just too slow to keep everything running properly.

The Diocesan web site gets upwards of an average of unique 3500 hits per day, which isn't an enormous load, but it certainly requires fairly responsive hosting resources.

The move was relatively painless, but we did initially have some casualties:  PHPList, which wasn't responding very well on the old host, needed some additional configuration to get it up and going again.  If you subscribe to E news, you may have noticed the 18 March 2008 issue dribbled out on the Easter weekend -- troubles with the new host maximum emails per hour.  Had some difficulties with the cgi script that powers the Resource Centre search function ... that seems to be resolved.  The Camp Medley web site which was originally hosted at campmedley.ca is now pointed to the Diocesan server and seems to be working fine now after some difficulties with folder permissions allowing it to be managed through a CMS by the Camp Medley program committee.

The Diocesan site is now with http://www.hostpapa.ca/.  They sport an impressive feature package including 1500 GB storage, unlimited email addresses, 100 MySQL databases and all at $5.95 per month for a 3 year contract.  This seems ridiculously inexpensive, but it is shared hosting, which is quite adequate for our purposes.  On top of it all, they are a green web host, using all wind generated electricity to power their servers and data centre.

I understand DotEasy offers basic hosting for free ... http://www.doteasy.com/Services/WebHosting/Zero/

Advice on setting up a parish web site would include that the free web hosting provided with Aliant or Rogers internet service is probably more than enough.  5 Mgs of free space.  You can find information on Aliant web space setup on their web site.
 
As far as the software for building and maintaining the site ... their are numerous free options that work very well.  The Mozilla browser package includes an application Composer that will do most normal creation and editing tasks.  You would also need an FTP client (like Smart FTP) to use with Composer to upload your finished pages.
 
A free package (can be downloaded free), built on the Mozilla code called Nvu is open source, free, and comparable to Dreamweaver - the professional web authoring suite.  The Nvu package includes FTP capability for updating/uploading).

Subsequently (24 October 2007) the sequel to NVu is KompoZer.  An upgraded version of NVu and probably the better choice.  It offers FTP (uploading) capability and WYSIWYG authoring.