need advice from website developers

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I'm trying to get our local peace and justice center set up with their own website.
They just received a good donated computer, so there's plenty of memory and
it runs XPS Gen 2 (whatever that is) I just know it's nice enough that we immediately
installed cables to leash it to the desk.

The problem is that the Peace Center is run by volunteers, and most of them have
no tech experience. What I want to do is set up a website that two or three other
non-techie volunteers will be able to learn how to maintain without spending too much
time on it.

My experience with websites started when I volunteered to take over the previous website
that a volunteer's husband had constructed out of javascript but could not maintain. I took a
crash course in FrontPage to learn how to make the necessary changes to pages, but didn't
always know what I was doing, so the site began to accumulate little "glitches" and kept having
problems with FrontPage extensions. It became evident that trying to turn the site over to
another volunteer would be a disaster, since so much of the publishing to the web relied on
remembering what and where the glitches were. And then I heard MS was ending support
of FrontPage. So I decided to redo the site.

I built a new site with the program "WebEasy7" with is created entirely by inserting text boxes.
I got this program because it was highly rated for being easy to learn and use (and relatively cheap). This program has some nice features -- like drag and drop photos from a file browser, lots of color choices, and several templates -- but it is very limited in handling lots of text, and if I change the "view" on my monitor from medium to very large, the text boxes overlap and the text runs together. So I suspect this is not a good program for use across different browsers.

So my question: can you recommend a web authoring program for technical klutzes? I've heard that DreamWeaver CS4 is very nice, but I don't know if it's non-techie friendly, and it is very expensive.

Less an editor more of a content management system - have you considered running your site on wordpress? (wordpress.org) anyone can post updates or whatever on a wordpress site it really is a no brainer.

the last one I did was done in Wordpad (html code), and updloaded with Hot Dog (I think...sausage software?).

Front Page is about as simple as you can get. It does insert a lot of extra HTML code into your web page (been there, done that..

If you go to Sourceforge, you can find hundreds of web page creators, all for free. I think what you might want to do (even though it would be a pain) is to save your current page, then start another straight from scratch.

Dreamweaver is one of the programs professionals use. I haven't played with it, but I seem to remember it ain't cheap. ColdFusion is another professional-level program, but the following posts can explain it better than I.

Many MS programs (Powerpoint, Word, etc) have the ability to output a web-based version of a document. Star Office (pretty much the same stuff, but free) may have this by now, but I haven't played with Star Office (also called Open Office) in years.

Hope this helps, even if as a bad example...

Thanks guys! Every bit of info helps.

Seriously...

Consider setting them up with a Google Account.

This will give them.

Gmail.
Google Sites (a very good web authoring program)
Blogger (in case you need it)
Google Docs for their "office needs"

iGoogle - so that you can embed everything in one easy page.

Plus... as a bonus, there's remote access. You can easily fix any mistakes or do any updates.

I did my site in Google Sites (http://sites.google.com/site/gavinbollard/).

It's not the most customizable thing in the world but it has some good/easy templates and you can use a lot of those wonderful google gadgets to pull stuff (and feeds) from other locations.

I'll check into that. Thanks!

Is there a fee for Google sites? The Peace Center can't take on any more expenses.
They have a business account with a local email provider, and I believe the package
they are paying for includes webhosting, so if they're paying for it already, why not
use it, right?

There are no fees for Google Sites.

Hosting and the tools are all free. There's probably advertising around them but have a look at my site and see how much you can see. .. not much (if any).

The only costs you could incur would be if you decided to put it on a different domain name. Then you'd have a domain name cost (which is about $100 annually - or less) and a one-off DNS redirection cost - which might be free.

A domain name doesn't cost $100 more like $10. you are essencially paying for hosting. So if you want your own domian google isn't your best option for hosting. It is good for the basic blogging.

You need a content management. The days of static content are over. It is not practical even for those who are not technical clutz. You want to be able to save time, and update your content easily on a regual basis.

What sort of site are you looking for, what is the primary objective?

Primary objective of the peace center’s website would be public outreach.

We want to let people know where the center is, what it looks like, what resources it houses (a lending library of books and DVDs on peace and social justice and environmental sustainability issues), give details on the various projects and committees it supports, have a list of the Peace center’s Board of Directors and maybe main supporting donors, advertise coming events and fundraisers, and have pages devoted to projects such as the local chapter of the Caravan to Cuba (donated medical supplies loaded into a donated bus, driven down to Mexico and shipped to Cuba in violation of US embargo). For the Cuba pages we’d like to have a Bus Blog, Caravan Schedule, photos of people met on the last “Friendshipment” , maybe an inventory of the medical supplies donated, information on how people can sign up to go with the Caravan, link to Pastors for Peace, a graphic that shows level donations received, etc.

It would also be nice to have a calendar where the peace center's office manager can show the reservation schedule for use of the peace center facilities. That way people can see when the center is available as a venue for their event before they call to reserve space.

The Peace Center is also planning to put together a short video about the Peace Center – it would be nice to have that on the website.

A main consideration is that the site needs to be set up so that a series of volunteers who have little tech experience can maintain it and change the information and photos frequently without destroying pages.

I’m also currently working to get the website for the local peace coalition (network of 24 local organizations) transferred over to a program designed to help members of a coalition work together more effectively, but the purpose of that website will primarily be inter-coalition communication, very functional and utilitarian with calendars and action alert email blasts that a rep from each organization can post to, but very little in pictures and customizable features, so the program I’m using for that is not appropriate for the peace center’s individual website.

I would use Web Hosting your ISP provides. I will also get a program like Dreamweaver and you can use that to help with your site. I can PM you some tutorials on HTML & JavaSpript if you want.

It depends where you buy your domain names. Here in Australia (and because we're corporate) we have to go through some more expensive channels. It's not like the company sees a difference between $10 and $100 anyway.

In your case, being a volunteer organisation, you can go a cheaper route and get a $10 domain name.

You can still have free google hosting but point your domain name to your Google Site.

It's also true that you can't have a static site these days and in that respect, I still think that the google tools are unparralleled. For example, suppose you create a Google Calendar to hold your upcoming events. Now this calendar can be a good reminder system for you etc... but also, you can use it as a feed on your google site. Simply add the calendar gadget to your google site and your users will automatically get an updated page whenever they look.

Similarly, you could create a Google Reader (or a digg) account and share certain feeds/pages. This could feed into a dynamic google gadget on your site to highlight articles/topics which might be of interest to your visitors.

Gavin, how do you do that?

By the sounds of it a content management system is defiantly needed for the website. For small basic websites, a static website is fine. A forum could be useful for the website. Good free as in price but also freedom OpenSource/FreeSoftware, in the web development category at: http://www.osalt.com

I think that people that use a type of software should ideally, have some sort of idea about that type of software: http://www.opensource.org http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html

Ideally someone that is making a website should at least be able to code basic HTML and CSS: http://www.w3schools.com

The website should be tested in, and work well in, Mozilla Firefox ( http://www.mozilla.com ), Opera ( http://www.opera.com ), Google Chrome ( http://www.google.com/chrome ), as well as, the very bad Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

The website should follow web standards: http://www.w3.org http://www.webstandards.org

The website should use a doctype declaration: http://w3schools.com/tags/tag_doctype.asp

The website should validate at w3.org: http://validator.w3.org/ http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

http://www.000webhost.com should do the trick for web hosting. A cheap domain name can be bought: http://www.godaddy.com

Forget about hosting it on Google! Google web hosting is for newbies, and so won't provide the advanced features that are needed.

My advice is the best so far!

Thank you, Seb. I'll copy, paste, and print your info so I can add it to my binder on the website.

If you're going to use web hosting, I'm going to recommend http://www.hostingone.ca for your hosting needs. I have used them for 2 different sites for around 2-3 years now. It's a family run business so you don't get some call center in India for tech support, but rather guys that have access to servers and can fix your problem quickly.

Their prices are more than reasonable. The $5/month or so packages do just fine for me.