Website Creation?

[Denny]

Hi all

We're hoping to develop a new website for Wandsworth Environment Forum this year. I've been looking at free or cheap ways of doing this, but haven't found anything that quite meets our needs yet. Can anyone help on this front? Do you know of anybody that might be willing to help us create something cheaply? Or have used any decent, easy-to-use software to create your own website?

Some of our key requirements include:

- keeping our domain name - www.wandsworthef.org.uk
- having a site that we can upload documents and photos on to
- having a site that can be easily updated by WEF members
- potential to include or link to a blog
- something that is flexible enough so that we can add widgets to it at a later date if necessary

Of course, we can use Project Dirt for these things too, but we'd like to have an external, more independent presence on the net too!

Your ideas and thoughts would be VERY much appreciated!

Thanks

Denny

[Nick]

Hi Denny

Much as we'd like everything to happen on Project Dirt, it's absolutely right and fair that groups should want to develop their own spaces on the internet! We just hope that the groups on PD will continue to link their sites back into Project Dirt to add the networking value.

I've sent this around to a few people, who hopefully can provide an answer for you, and I hope that in logging them here we might be able to start to build a 'how-to' resource / guidelines for other community groups and projects in a similar position! From a quick scan, using Wordpress and Blogspot seem to be popular options.

(PS: Of the points above, you may want to consider hosting your blog on PD if it's easiest?)

Nick

[David Thorne]

Hi Denny,

The best sites I have used are blogger.com which is part of google and so you can use googledocs and calendar, picassa photos, use your web address etc see http://www.transitiontowntooting.org/ for an example
AND ning.com where you can create your own social network see http://21stcenturynetwork.ning.com/

Hope this helps

David

[Phil Green]

Hi Denny

Not much to add to what's above, but ning looks quite a good fit for what you might want. Also agree with what Nick says re networking eg as well as your own site keep being seen in a variety of other places such as PD (Maybe also an article or at least a link on SCA wiki?)

[Sue]

We are still struggling with this at Hyde Farm... but we think we have someone on the case. i will let you know if we make any progress
Sue

[Chris Morrison]

Denny

We have created a website in wordpress (free software from www.wordpress.com). You can see the result here: www.assa.org.uk

I am not techie and the website was actually created by one of our members who is more capable than I but it isn't that hard to create something that looks pretty good, you just need to read the instructions.

Here are some neat features about having a Wordpress site (my words not marketing so we do really use them!)
1. You can give access to anyone to write pages for the site so one person does not have all the admin burden. All the people have to do is get a wordpress account.
2. You create a new page via wordpress.com and can do it anytime form any computer even apparently on your iPhone!
3. YOu can keep your existing domain name
4. You can set up RSS or email feeds so members will be informed of new posts. You can also link other sites to yours by having their RSS feeds.
5. All articles appear on a sort of scrolling list but you can categorise them so they are grouped (for example all the green issues on our website)
6. You can tag photos on your flikr account so all flikr photos with that tag will appear on the site. This is a great way to enable different people to load photos up to the site with minimum hassle.

What else? Well in case I didn't mention, its free, fairly easy to use and, best of all, doesn't rely on one person to update so it is updated much more frequently.

Chris

[Jack Kelly]

Hi Denny,

If you've got a tiny bit of experience with PHP then you could try the content management system Drupal. Drupal is very powerful and there's a huge community behind it. But it is quite a steep learning curve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal
drupal.org

We built peckhampower.org on Drupal.

[Denny]

Hello Nick, David, Phil, Sue, Chris and Jack!

Wow, loads of really suggestions there. I will into all your various ideas etc and let you know what we decide to. You've left me confident, at least, that it should be relatively simple to set up something for free and to make it quite flexible. Wordpress looks particularly interesting.

Thanks again

Denny

[Felix Gonzales]

Hi Denny if you need a hand walking through some web options then drop me a line....

[Jack Kelly]

You could try http://www.squarespace.com/

To quote their website:

"What is it?
A fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining your website.

Who is it for?
Bloggers. Businesses large and small. Authors. Teachers. Lawyers. Doctors. Squarespace's flexible platform can power sites of all sizes.

Why use it?
We give you full control over your content and site customization. You can build it 10X faster on our comprehensive platform. Seriously."

I haven't tried it myself but I've heard very good things about it.

Free trial and prices start at $8 a month I think.

[Ashleigh Sarah Maule-ffinch]

Hi Denny,
I am a communications designer in London. My husband is a web developper. We would like to help your cause and help you out for free, discuss options and get you up and running cheaply. Sounds like you would benefit from a blog with a content management system like wordpress so you could upload text and images as you go.

my website is www.ashleighffinch.com
Its just a portfolio but you can get an idea of who I am :)

I am looking for environmental, ethical projects to add to my portfolio! Would love to put my skills towards something meaningful...

Cheers,
Ashleigh & Thibault

[Denny]

Ashleigh, Thibault

Thanks you SO much for this offer, I would definitely like to take you up. I've sent you a separate message with my details, but just in case, here they are again: [e-mail] / 07949 294 680. Can't wait to speak to you further!

Denny

[Nicola Thomas]

I absolutely adore www.squarespace.com - you can have a website any corp would spend tens of thousand on, and you can have for about £10 a month. I use for my eco friendly magazine and you can have widgets, blogging software, design html pages without any knowledge of html, create forms, have facilities to upload documents, pages to download documents, they have a forum software, membership, all sorts of things and it's all incredibly easy to update with their Content Management System. The software also has great SEO - I get thousands of hits via organic searches which is free - a great bonus. Worth a look I think.