How to Start a Website

Here are some thoughts based on my three years of experience running a small web-based fundraising campaign for Korean orphans (www.samsungwon.org). ~Aimee Jachym

Domain Names & Web Hosting

In order to have a webpage based at “www.youroganizationname.org”, you need to register the domain name. There are a number of Internet sites that over this service, and I’ve used www.nameroute.com. It costs about $20/yr for the site domain, 10mb of space, and an email account (e.g. name@whatever.org). You can also register the domain name without receiving webspace, and this is a good cheaper option if your university or web service provider gives you free Internet space. You can simply use the domain name to reroute to your university webpage.

Web Design

With minimal technical skills, you can create a decent-looking page using a free template (try www.elated.com) and Dreamweaver, the industry standard for webpage creation. Macromedia lets you try Dreamweaver for 30-days free. For those just starting out, a simple free page kit offered by geocities.yahoo.com or similar web services might be a good place to dive in. I’ve done everything at www.samsungwon.org with minimal HTML skills, Dreamweaver, and a free pagekit from elated.com.

Avoid the urge to make your website overly flashy or fancy. My experience is that the simple design makes pages load faster and look cleaner and more professional.

Visitor Tracking

In order to keep track of how many visitors your site gets every day, a website counter is a good idea. You can get an “invisible counter” for free at www.statcounter.com . This web service provides you with detailed stats on where your visitors are located (geographically), what websites they came from, what operating systems they use, and a whole lot more.

Show Up on Search Engines

In order to get the word out about your project, you’ll want to ensure you show up on Google, Yahoo!, and the other major search engines. Though there are services that offer to list your site for a fee, I haven’t used any of them and don’t think they’re necessary.

With your site counter (described above), you can figure out what key words people are using to visit your site. These key words and other “big idea” words should be included in the title of your page (the blue bar [if you use IE] at the top of the browser). The title is one of the main areas search engines go to for determining whether a site is on target with a search.

For instance, I noticed people were coming to my page looking for “Gumi, South Korea,” so I made the title of the main page “Samsungwon, an Orphange in Gumi, South Korea.” This improved the website’s position (closer to the top of the search page) on searches for “Gumi, South Korea.”

Generally speaking, Google and the other search engines automatically “crawl” the Internet looking for new pages and updating their current directories. In order to do this, they crawl through both the titles of your pages and also the text content itself. Thus, if your webpage is well-titled and has sufficient content, within a short time, it’ll automatically start showing up in searches related to your topic.

Online Donations

Though I haven’t tried any of the other available options and ample criticisms abound, I find [[http://www.paypal.com|Paypal]] to be a good and easy service to use. It allows users to donate securely online via credit card, bank draft, or check. It’s free for donors and charges you $0.39 + 2.9% per transaction regardless of whether donors pay via check or credit. There’s also a surcharge on international donations.

Given the fact that people are generally too busy (or too lazy) to write out a check, stamp it, and put it in the mail, the Paypal transaction cost is more than made up for by convenience.

Make Money w/ Ads

Once your webpage is off the ground, you can use it to make some money for your organization with some strategically placed ads powered by Google. See www.google.com/adsense . I believe Yahoo! also offers a similar service.

See Also

Links