Brochure websites

We get a lot of requests from charities for help with their websites. As I write there are over 200 opportunities listed on the site! Often all the charity needs is a small brochure-style website so that they can tell the world what they do and how to get in touch with them. Sadly we don’t have enough volunteers to build all these websites.

What can we do to help?
More volunteers would be nice, but sometimes skilled web-technologists would prefer to do something more exciting than a simple brochure website. So can we point the charities towards some tools that they could use themselves to create basic websites?
I was talking to the representative of a charity the other day and he mentioned a couple of tools that he’d seen used successfully by community groups.

The first is Soho. Apparently this is a template-based website building wizard and CMS which is very easy to use. However, this software isn’t free and needs to be installed on the server hosting the site. This could be possibly be a solution where a number of small charities all share the same server and could spread the cost of the software.

The second suggestion was NetObjects Fusion (http://www.netobjects.com/). Apparently this is used in a similar way to MS Publisher and should be easy to use. The HTML produced is “quite good” and version 7 was recently distributed free with Net magazine.
Do you have any experience with either of these tools? Do you think they could be used successfully by enthusiastic amateurs? Or is there a better solution? As ever, we’d love to have your comments at info@iT4Communities.org.uk.

Anne Donnelly
iT4C Project Definer