Website

Creating a Website is a great way to stretch a limited budget, the internet provides the best information distribution method for your donated dollar.

Determine what content you want

There is nothing more frustrating than someone who wants your help, but don't know exactly what that is. So before moving on to the next step, determine roughly how you want the website to look, what sections you want on it, what content you want. And by all means don't re-invent the wheel, steal as many ideas as you can from other Collective websites.

Determine what you can afford

Unless you can find someone to donate hosting, over a two year period you can expect to pay $200 for registering a domain name an hosting fees.

Sometimes you will find a nerdy volunteer who will offer to host it out of their apartment. While this may seem impressive, many a website and hours of hard work have been lost because of a power failure. A regular web hosting service has these problems too but they also run backups all the time to insure that your data will not be lost. This is a priceless service.

Find a web savy volunteer

While this isn't rocket science, it helps to have someone that knows what they are doing. They can be in demand, as a result some of them can be flakey. The important thing is to be very clear up front as to what you want the website to look and feel like as well as what information should be where.

Register a domain name

You don't actually buy domain names, you just lease them from a Domain Name Registrar at yearly rate. They all do the same thing key things, but oddly enough they cost different amounts.GoDaddy has them for $9.00 per year while Network Solutions is around $15 per year.

You will most likely want to pick a .org (top level) domain name. Since they are used for organizations. As you may have guessed .com is for commerce websites.

Find a Web Hosting Service

Once you have rented the domain name, you need somewhere to park it -- just like a bicycle. A Web Hosting Service is where all the HTML, graphics, and scripting files will be kept. Unlike registrars, Web Hosting Services offer many different services and at various prices. An example is DreamHost if you pay two years up from they run at a rate of $7.95 -- this is a good deal.

The features you want to compare in a web hosting service are:

• Disk Storage -- Just like an iPod, how much can fit?
• Monthly Bandwidth -- This becomes a bigger issue with lots of graphics and multimedia.
• MySQL Databases -- You will need this if you plan on using a Content Management System (CMS).

Re-direct DNS / Name Servers

Once you have a web hosting service, they can help you figure out how to set up the DNS. In a nut shell you need to point the registrar to the web hosting service, which can take up to 48 hours. The web hosting service will give you two or three strange looking domain names.

Example:

• NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
• NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
• NS3.DREAMHOST.COM

You will then need to log into the Registrar where you purchased your domain name and set the Name Servers for your domain to those two or three strange looking domain names. If this is done correctly, you should be able to do a WHOIS search on the domain and see the change.

Content Management Systems

Once they are set up, Content Management Systems (CMS) are an easy way for any volunteer(s) to update website content without having to involve a web savy volunteer. The computer world has its own brand of non-profits and they are called 'open source projects'. Once such free CMS is called Joomla. This is what www.slcbikecollective.org, www.sopobikes.org, and www.bikecollectives.org runs on. There are thousands of pre-made templates (ex: Joomla Hut) to choose from as well as even more extensions to quickly bolt on forums, picture galleries, email lists, calendars, volunteer signups, donations, news, blogs, user accounts, etc.