Website

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A content management system (CMS) can help when you have a larger website, or need something that is more complex than a static page. Also, producing dynamic information is much easier when using a CMS.

Contents

FAQ

How much should it cost to put up a campaign web site and how long should it take?

The fact is, putting up web sites, sending mass emails, and managing a simple campaign data base is pretty simple stuff... for someone who knows how to do it. So your goal needs to be: get someone who really knows how to do it and has done it with success many times. People who give good results in the Internet services world eventually realize they're worth a lot of money. So don't feel bad about paying someone a decent fee. But you may luck out and find a super sharp college kid who can do everything you need for the price of Pizza and Pop. (True geeks REALLY love those two things, and if you keep them constantly surround by both, they may just work around the clock for you.)

Just remember, the geeks' responsibility is the make the stuff actually work. You're responsibility is to get them out of the office and find someone new if they turn out not to be qualified or willing to do the work. The consultant/vendor field for Internet services is not very well developed yet, especially at the state and local level. So you will be doing everyone a favor by demanding high standards at this early stage of the industries development.

Freeware Website Building Tools

NVU 
free website development program
HTML Tidy 
HTML Tidy is a free open source tool (available for multiple platforms) to check and clean your html code for standards compliance
WebXACT 
WebXACT is a free online tool to test web pages for accessibility issues:
Google Analytics 
Not for design, exactly, but Google Analytics is great for analyzing your site traffic

Custom Software Development Organizations

These companies focus on working with progressive organizations

Advomatic 
Advomatic
Blue State Digital 
Blue State Digital
CivicActions 
CivicActions does custom website and CRM development for progressive campaigns using open-source tools.
Development Seed 
Development Seed
EchoDitto 
EchoDitto

Webserver

There are two major web server systems:

IIS 
Internet Information Services. This is Microsoft's platform. IIS 6 is the full version (~$400), IIS 5 comes with Windows XP.
Apache 
The open source (and free) alternative to IIS. You can download it from Apache.org, or get a bundled installer for Apache with PHP (programming language) and MySQL (database system) here.

Best Practices

Related Topics

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