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Web Presence

The enviro-geek collective provides by-donation and/or free websites and other online services for not-for-profit environmental and social justice groups. We can do everything that you need for a website (and related stuff – see below), but we'd prefer if you can find someone interested in learning how to do it, firstly because we already have a lot on our hands, and secondly because we want other people to learn how to do it, to make it easier for the whole movement in the future - we're very willing to teach!

Standard stuff we can provide includes:

  • Hosting: if you've already got a web site or web designer, we can host your web site on our servers. If you need a domain name we can help you register it.
  • Web sites: we can provide a web site system that makes it easy for anyone to maintain their own web site. It features an easy interface for adding and editing pages, forums, polls, images and galleries, events and a calendar system, and more. See Web Sites below.
  • Email: we can provide email accounts hosted on our server. These are accessible via a webmail interface or stand-alone email client (eg Thunderbird or Outlook).
  • Mailing lists: we can provide email mailing lists for internal communication within an organisation or news-letter type lists for keeping members up to date.

If there's some other web help you need that it isn't listed here please contact us and we'll do our best to help you or steer you in the right direction!

Web Sites

Before you decide you want a website, have a group brainstorm and discussion about why a website would be good for your group, and what features you would need to get the most out of the site.

Our websites are usually based on the Drupal content management system (CMS). A CMS provides features that facilitate and automate the maintenance, organisation and display of web site content. Drupal is extremely flexible, very user-friendly and can be easily maintained by the owner and other users, however, there will always be situations which require different tools, so if you think something else would be more suitable, let us know.

Our standard website setup has the following features:

  • Quick and easy to use content editing interface.
  • Many default themes to choose from. Or check out http://drupal.org/project/themes/
  • Placement of your logo and/or a picture in the header.
  • Ability to grant different editing and access permissions to any number of users and user types.
  • Content can be organised into categories and heirarchies.
  • A contact page where users can fill in a contact form, making it easier for your users to get in touch with you.
  • Built-in site search functionality; users can search the site directly from the site.
  • SPAM prevention for user comments and forums.
  • Search engine optimisation, allowing people to find you easily.
  • Web statistics so you can see how many people are using your web site.
  • A step-by-step guide on how to use the content management system.
  • Hosting on our server if needed.

Optional:

  • Easily updatable image galleries.
  • Allow users to leave comments on content items (pages, events, images) which may be moderated.
  • List events on your site with an automatically updated calendar and upcoming/time-till event listing.
  • User forums/bulletin boards where you and/or the user can create and discuss topics which may be moderated.
  • Create polls/surveys, make it easy to find out what users of your site think about any topic you like.
  • Accept donations from your site.
We don't add content to these web sites because you know best what content you want and how you want it to look, and so we can focus on providing the best technical support possible to the most groups and organisations. If you want something special or custom done, or want someone to add or maintain web site pages, check out our list of commercial IT service providers that enviro-geek members work with (and that generally offer discounts to NFPs).