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Guides to Photo and Document Preservation and Sharing for Families and Community Historical Societies

Creating A Historical Society Website

By R. Anderson - 2/2009

An organization web site offers you the greatest potential to control content and expand a site's uses over time. However, developing and maintaining a website from scratch can be challenging. This article discusses both websites and some of the alternative ways to obtain a web presence.

To create your own domain and web presence can be very satisfying, but challenging and costly. Many online web site hosting services provide templates for websites that can be customized to varying degrees. Many allow you to preview their site building features. Whether you are just curious or actually have an identified need, a visit to a few of these sites can be educational, and help you decide whether the work entailed in developing your own website is preferred to an alternative such as a share site. Share sites are described and discussed in Building a Shutterfly Historical Society Share Site.

If you are considering exploring a society website, your choices are to:
○ Design the site from scratch
○ Pay someone to design exactly what you want
○ Use a pre-designed template that is available at a website hosting service

► Pay for a custom designed web site - Most hosting companies offer a service to custom design a web site to your specifications, and there is probably a local web design firm or freelancer that will offer some help. However, custom design can be time consuming and costly. Therefore, the cost of paying for design, maintenance, and hosting combined is often beyond the budget of many smaller community based historical societies.

► Web Site Templates - Many hosting companies offer the use of pre-designed templates to entice you to use their hosting services. You are provided an interface to customize these templates to a degree that does not require any web design coding knowledge. Although these templates are by nature pretty standard, this is an inexpensive and quick way to obtain a website internet presence.

► Design Your Own Web Site - If you have a desire to learn more about web design and would like the ability to create web pages exactly the way you would like them, you will need to acquire web design software such as Adobe Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web. However, unless you have the curiosity, time, and motivation, I suggest that you try build-a-site templates at hosting services or share sites at large online printers as a starting point.

There is no magic to using web design software to create a website, and some basic templates come with the software needed to design a site. However, web design coding is a language unto itself, and unless you plan to develop a web presence beyond sharing images, it will not be worth the effort. In any case, you can learn more about actual web design layout and software by visiting Expression Web at Microsoft. This site includes some tutorials, which will provide a feel for how web sites are designed and coded.

Building a Website By Using a Hosting Company Template

The #1 registrar of domain names is www.GoDaddy.com. This hosting service was an early entry in web site hosting, so they have plenty of experience in helping people onto the web. Many flexible templates can help you get up quickly. If you visit the site to explore, find your way to "site builders", and take the product tour. Scroll down and look for the product tour tab and browse the templates. GoDaddy markets in a flashy sort of way, but their services are time tested and technical support can be very important.

Another good place to explore and learn is at Yahoo Small Business. If you have a business idea that you have been anxious to explore, this site may be for you. Even if you do not need a business site, the site building support capability here is impressive and a visit can be a learning experience. Building a website is now easier than ever with Yahoo! Web Hosting.