Website Options for Nonprofits — Part 3: Use Your Browser to Build a Website

This is the last in a three-part series dis­cussing web­site options for nonprofits.

Part 1 gave back­ground infor­ma­tion about what a web­site really is and dis­cussed options for where yours can live.

Part 2 dis­cussed the tra­di­tional approach: installing a web page edi­tor on your com­puter and using it to build a website.

But the last 5 years have intro­duced a bevvy of tools that promise to let you build a web­site using noth­ing but the most basic and ubiq­ui­tous tool of the Web Age: the hum­ble web browser. In this third post we’ll take a look at those tools.

Series overview

• Part One cov­ers fun­da­men­tal con­cepts and con­sid­ers tra­di­tional web­site host­ing options.
• Part Two cov­ers options for cre­at­ing web pages using a tra­di­tional web edit­ing program.
• Part Three cov­ers tools that let you build a web­site using just your web browser.

Easy page builders from your web host

For years many web hosts have offered tools that let you build a site from within your browser. In fact, if you already have an account with a web host there’s an excel­lent chance your host offers some kind of easy web­site builder. Web hosts makes these tools avail­able only to their clients.

Here’s the pitch: “Want a web­site? Well come on down! Pay us a low monthly fee and you’ll get email and the space for a web­site. Don’t know how to make a web­site? No wor­ries! Just use these sweet, easy tools!”

The qual­ity of host-based page builders ranges from tragic to tol­er­a­ble, with “tol­er­a­ble” mean­ing you can put together a not-bad look­ing web­site with a stan­dard­ized struc­ture and per­haps a few add-ins, like photo gal­leries or event calendars.

Usu­ally, though not always, site cre­ated with “easy web­site builders” look like… well, like they were cre­ated with easy web­site builders. But some web­site is bet­ter than no web­site at all (usually).

Some of these tools are pretty sim­ple, where oth­ers are really fairly com­pre­hen­sive and act as tol­er­a­ble Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMSs, dis­cussed below).

If you’d like to see what these tools look like, check out:

• Soho­launch
• Site­Builder
• Tem­plate Express
• Net­work Solu­tions’ web­site builder
• Yahoo Site Solution

Some web hosts sim­ply bun­dle in tools devel­oped by other com­pa­nies, tools like Soho­launch, Site­Builder, and Tem­plate Express. Other hosts use inde­pen­dent tools like these but private-label them. A very few hosts are large enough to develop their own web­site builders.

Trade-offs

As a pro­fes­sional web devel­oper these sys­tems always make me cringe a lit­tle, so while I’ve exper­i­mented with them I’ve never launched a site with one. The sites they pro­duce can eas­ily look canned, like the dif­fer­ence between stock pho­tog­ra­phy and tak­ing your own pic­ture. And though many give you a lot of flex­i­bil­ity, it’s flex­i­bil­ity with some hard-coded constraints.

Still, if you’re okay with the way the site looks, there are worse things than build­ing a web­site by choos­ing some options from a menu.

Inde­pen­dent web­site builders

Some browser-based web­site builder aren’t meant to be bun­dled up with a web host, but are their own inde­pen­dent com­pa­nies. They not only give you a tool to cre­ate a site, but also do the host­ing for you.

Some of these sites are entirely free if you don’t mind ads appear­ing on your site. Many oper­ate on a freemium busi­ness model, giv­ing you free host­ing with cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions, and let­ting you pay more for addi­tional features—like ad-free host­ing, more file stor­age space, or your own domain name.

To use one of these ser­vices you don’t need a web host at all. Or to look at it another way, these ser­vices will be a web host for you. Just sign up for an account and off you go.

Here are a few examples:

• Google Sites
• Square­space (arguably a CMS, see side­bar); non­profit examples
• Wee­bly
• Wix

Trade-offs

As with host-based site builders, these ser­vices vary greatly in the qual­ity of their offer­ings. And as with host-based site builders, there’s a risk that your site will look dated, or like it was built from a canned template—which it was. How­ever, some of them give nice tem­plate options, and some even let you go in and mod­ify the site’s visual tem­plate if you, a vol­un­teer, or a con­trac­tor is hep to the whole HTML thing.

Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMSs)

A con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem is a web­site that lets peo­ple add and edit the site’s con­tent with­out sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal knowledge.

The con­tent might be a blog post, a doc­u­ment you’re col­lab­o­ra­tively cre­at­ing with other peo­ple, pho­tos, video clips, a birth­day wish list, a tuto­r­ial on installing Quick­Books, or a sim­ple data­base of your favorite vinyl LPs. Regard­less of the type of con­tent, the prin­ci­ple is the same: ordi­nary human beings pull together the infor­ma­tion they want to share, and the CMS lets them enter it in a way that oth­ers can find it on the web.

Some CMSs are exot­i­cally pow­er­ful and require some­one geeky to spend a good deal of time set­ting them up before you can use them. Some are so sim­ple that your Great Aunt Hazel could set them up. Whether they’re pow­er­ful con­tent engines or straight­for­ward blog­ging sites, they’re all CMSs. (At least accord­ing to me and all like-minded peo­ple; see the sidebar.)

Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tems (CMSs) are a great way for non­prof­its and small busi­nesses to cre­ate a web pres­ence with­out much or any tech­ni­cal help. I’ve believed and taught that for a while, but it really came home to me with…

The tale of the not-so-geeky ED

Last year I was talk­ing with the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of a mid-sized non­profit about his pub­lic website.

It was a famil­iar story: years ago some­one made the web­site for them using a rea­son­ably sophisticated-web devel­op­ment tool (in this case Microsoft Front­Page). They rarely needed to update the site, so when it finally came time to change the site, nobody at the non­profit really remem­bered how the soft­ware worked or how to upload changes. Their four options:

1. Spend staff time try­ing to remem­ber or re-learn the reasonably-sophisticated web devel­op­ment tool, under­stand­ing that they’d likely have to remem­ber or re-learn again when the updated the site six months later.
2. Find a vol­un­teer with the right skills, under­stand­ing that if the vol­un­teer moved or was unavail­able they’d be stuck.
3. Pay some­one money every time they wanted to make a small update.
4. Let the site stagnate.

One day they wanted to add an area on the web­site where they could share infor­ma­tion with their employ­ees and affiliates.

This ED is a smart and tech­ni­cally curi­ous per­son. He is not, how­ever, a web geek. Even so, rather than accept­ing the four sub­op­ti­mal options he took the ini­tia­tive to do what many non­prof­its have done, cre­at­ing an Option Five.

He went to WordPress.com and cre­ated a sim­ple web­site where they could post infrequently-changing infor­ma­tion (web pages) along with peri­odic infor­ma­tion updates (blog posts). Now they have a site that they can update with­out need­ing to find, pay for, or develop sig­nif­i­cant tech­ni­cal expertise.

What are your CMS Options?

You have plenty. Prob­a­bly too plenty. There are at least hun­dreds of CMS plat­forms to choose from, and very likely thousands.

Many require you to have a web host, and to install the CMS soft­ware on your account with that web host.

The rest are pub­lic web­sites that both pro­vide a CMS and host your data online for you.

I’m about to give you a bunch of resources to look at, sites that will give you a lot of infor­ma­tion about a lot of CMSs. But first, let me give you the sim­ple ver­sion in my opinion:

• Sim­ple site, sim­ple styles. If you want a rel­a­tively straight­for­ward site and are will­ing to pick from a lim­ited set of visual themes, con­sider WordPress.com. You get free host­ing and around 100 themes to choose from. You can pay for cer­tain perks if you want, like a guar­an­tee of no ads on your site, or the abil­ity to use your own domain name. You can change a few things about the themes for free, and a few more things if you pay an extra fee, but you can’t down­load arbi­trary themes or cre­ate a new one. WordPress.com also won’t host email for your domain name.
• Sim­ple site, flex­i­ble styles. If you want more flex­i­bil­ity in themes, or if you want to use one web host for both your email and your web­site, con­sider con­tract­ing with a tra­di­tional web host that will let you install your own copy of Word­Press or another CMS. While they don’t usu­ally come pre-installed, most hosts give you a con­trol panel that will let you install Word­Press, Dru­pal, Joomla, or some­thing like them with just a few clicks. When you have your own copy of a CMS, you or a vol­un­teer or con­trac­tor can down­load and install a vari­ety of third-party themes.
• Sophis­ti­cated site. If you want a more sophis­ti­cated site—one that includes dis­cus­sion boards, man­ages a data­base of donors and vol­un­teers, or lets peo­ple col­lab­o­rate on documents—well, you’ve just left the Land of Do-It-Yourself Web­sites. While you can pull off some of these things in browser-based site builders, a com­plex site really requires the ser­vices of one or more tech­ni­cal professionals.

Resources to help you pick a CMS

But that’s just the EZ ver­sion of the deci­sion. It doesn’t take into account your actual needs or how a given CMS addressed them.

So here are some resources to help you pick the right CMS.

Bear in mind that some CMSs (*cough* Dru­pal *cough*) are not for the faint-of-heart or for the non-of-geek. Even some sim­pler CMSs (*cough* Word­Press *cough*) often need a geek to move beyond the basics. That doesn’t rule them out, it just means you have to be ready for the usual techie-seeking ten­sion: you’ll need to find or cre­ate a geek on your staff, or find one who will vol­un­teer with you, or pay one money.

• Idealware’s 2010 Open CMS Com­par­i­son — Ide­al­ware (12/2010)
• Should your non­profit upgrade to Word­Press? — John Hay­don (8/2010)
• 5 Light­weight CMS Alter­na­tives for Small Busi­nesses — Mash­able (8/2010)
• A Nonprofit’s Guide to Build­ing Sim­ple, Low-Cost Web­sites — Tech­Soup (7/2009)

And a cou­ple of tools to help you com­pare them:

• open­sourceCMS: lets you try demo ver­sions of many CMSs
• CMS Matrix: lets you com­pare fea­tures of many, many CMSs

Build­ing a site with your browser: what’s the catch?

So here we have a bunch of tools that will let you build a web­site with lit­tle or no deep tech­ni­cal knowl­edge, using noth­ing but a web browser, and often for free: host-based web­site builders, inde­pen­dent web­site builders, and Con­tent Man­age­ment Systems.

What’s not to like about that?

I dis­cussed some of the trade-offs above, but there’s a con­sol­i­dated list:

• Ease of use. The tools vary in how easy they are to use. It’s much eas­ier for a novice to sit down and bang out a Word­Press site than a Dru­pal site.
• Flex­i­bil­ity. While tools vary greatly in how much flex­i­bil­ity they give you, most give you less flex­i­bil­ity than a tra­di­tional, custom-written web­site (in exchange for the abil­ity to update it non-technically).
• Cos­met­ics. The sim­plest tools some­times leave you with a site that looks like it was cre­ated by a teen-aged vol­un­teer in 1998.
• Tech essen­tial. Most do require tech­ni­cal knowl­edge for cer­tain kinds of changes.
• Tech lim­i­ta­tions. Some won’t let you make cer­tain changes even if you have tech knowledge.

But maybe most impor­tant, and most eas­ily over­looked in those heady ini­tial days when you’re happy with the new site and every­thing looks rosy:

• Lock-in. To one degree or another you’re locked in to the web builder plat­form you choose, and some­times to a sin­gle web host.

If you get fed up with your web host, but you used your host’s easy builder to make your site, there’s prob­a­bly no easy way to move to another web host or CMS.

If you get fed up with an inde­pen­dent web­site builder like Wee­bly or Square­Space, and if you’re itch­ing to move, you’re also prob­a­bly out of luck.

Things are a lit­tle more portable in the CMS world: as long as you’re using a pop­u­lar, widely-available tool, it’s very likely you can move from one web host to another. And while it’s not easy, it’s gen­er­ally pos­si­ble with tech­ni­cal knowl­edge to move the con­tent from one CMS to another.

Series Wrap-Up

I hope you’ve found this series of arti­cles helpful.

If all has gone as planned, you now have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of web­sites and web host­ing, and of your options for cre­at­ing a site with lit­tle or no help from a pro­fes­sional techie.

And even if you don’t sud­denly feel like some big com­puter genius, that’s okay. Depend­ing on your com­fort with tech­ni­cal daring-do, you might very well decide after read­ing all this you still want to get help from a staff mem­ber, vol­un­teer, or con­sul­tant. You’re not alone in that.

But regard­less of whether you ask for help, now that you have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the essen­tials you should be in a much bet­ter posi­tion to know what kind of help you need, and how much of it you need.

Best of luck, and have fun with the web.