Make a website like this one

Here's an overview of how to make a robust collaborative web presence for your organization.

We are using Blue Host hosting for a cheap-cheap $6.95 a month. You get a zillion e-mail addresses, unlimited space, many pre-built web applications and loads more -everything you'd ever want. The most amazing thing about Blue Host is that I get real live human tech support geeks who speak english and almost always instantly available. Lots and lots of other hosting services offer very similar perks nowadays but I really like these guys. Though you can actually host more than one website for the same $6.95, I like to get folks to buy their own space for each website 'cause it's so cheap and leaves them free to do what they like in the future.

Blue Host allows installation of free "open source" applications that, essentially, give you a website in a box. Users of the application update the application constantly so you just keep getting new features for free! The applications are easily installed but take a bit of chutzpa to set up. You do not have to be a programmer but you ought to be someone unafraid of software and willing to poke around and make mistakes -someone who might be termed a "power user".

These applications generally have a number of features you can either turn on or add on as a plug in. These features include such things as blogs, forums, chat rooms, file and image upload/download and more. Note: the Google Calendar system we use here is separate and is displayed by dropping a chunk of "IFRAME" code on page somewhere on the website. You can include lots of other info from lots of other websites and you can publish info for other sites to display using "RSS".

Technically: The applications we have chosen to use in CD3 are TikiWiki? and Joomla. Both are what are called CMS or Content Management Systems and there are many more of these applications available for free. They are largely PHP pages and templates that call data from a MySQL database. If that sounds imposing, it's not a huge deal -you don't mess with the PHP or the database and it all gets installed for you by installer scripts.

Within these applications you can gather registered users into groups and assign them permissions to do or see things on the site. So maybe a group called Officers is the only one that can upload, download or view documents relating to internal matters. Maybe you want everyone, even non logged in users, to see the pictures from your last Fish Fry. The permission features are usually very robust in these kinds of applications and allow you to really micromanage how groups of users use the site.

Tikiwiki adds a Wiki feature. A wiki is just a series of webpages created and edited by users using nothing more than the browser they use to surf the net. Any number of users can easily edit the same pages (See Wikipedia). We chose this because we want our teams to create web pages that any member of their team can update. We also want people to think of the web as not just giving them information but a something they can contribute to. Most importantly the site is meant to be a collaborative endeavor -everyone works to fill up the pages. We know you have to drag people kicking and screaming to participate in new ideas like this but if even a few people maintain these pages it means you don't have to and/or you don't have to hunt up a webmaster to get your site updated.

Someone a little tech savvy can get all this rolling in a matter of a day or so. If not I can set these up and do an initial config for a few hundred clams. I have a real job though and I wouldn't be able to charge non profit organizations enough to make it worth my while to provide ongoing tech support, configuration and updating (unless of course, you are rolling in dough -then, by all means, call me!).