More on Brochure Websites

A couple of months ago I asked for suggestions for helping charities who want simple “brochure-style” websites. I define a “brochure-style” site as one with no interactivity, a few pages of text and some images.

We had some great ideas submitted including some WYSIWYG editors (Nvu - http://www.nvu.com and iWeb), a couple of Content Management Systems (Drupal - http://drupal.org/ and CMS Made Simple - http://cmsmadesimple.org/) and a wiki (MediaWiki - http://www.mediawiki.org).

We’d love to be able to write a couple of pages of step-by-step instructions that we could pass to a charity so they can create a site themselves. Sadly, that’s not a practical solution. There are varying levels of IT-literacy within our charities and so many variables involved in creating a site – what facilities does their host provide, do they have an FTP package, what will they use to edit pages, etc. All these questions are second nature to an experienced developer but not to the average charity worker.

So, can we make it easier for you, the volunteer, to create a simple site and for the charity to keep it up to date once completed? Would you like a guide to setting up a Drupal site or installing MediaWiki and configuring them for a charity to use? How about a set of accessible themes to choose from? And a basic user guide that you can give to the charity to help them keep the site maintained? If we provided these tools would you use them?

Are there any experienced web developers who’d like to contribute to this project? A little collaborative effort could benefit dozens of charities in the long term. There are over 200 website projects list on the site at the moment; if only 25% of them need brochure sites that’s 50 charities we could help. We can set up a discussion forum or e-mail group to discuss your ideas if there’s enough interest.

Well, I've raised loads of questions. Over to you. Do you want to help? Would you use the tools if they were easily available? As ever drop us an e-mail with your comments to info@iT4Communities.org.uk

Anne Donnelly