What You Need to Build a Basic Site

There are six basic technical requirements for creating an effective Web site:

• Computer
• Internet Access
• Web space
• Web Editor
• Graphics Editor
• Domain Name (Optional)

Computer

To develop a Web site, you should have a reasonably powerful computer capable of running up-to-date Internet and Web development software reliably.

Recommended specifications:

Processor-

(PC)

Pentium-200 or faster;

(Mac)

PowerPC 604e or G3

Operating System-

(PC)

Windows 95 or Windows 98;

(Mac)

System 7.6.1 or OS 8.x

Memory (RAM-)

MB or more

Internet Access

In order to publish a Web site, you need to have basic dialup PPP Internet access. Most nonprofit organizations now have at least one machine in their office with the necessary Internet access.

Web Space

Many Internet access accounts include 2-5 MB of "personal" Web space. This is plenty of space to begin developing a simple Web site for your organization. It generally won't have a domain name (see below) or fancy high-end features such as database integration, but that's OK. As you gain experience with Web publishing and have a better idea of the technical and human requirements, you can always move your Web page to a Web space that offers more robust features.

There are a number of companies which offer free Web space. Although features and technical support will be minimal, this can be a good choice if you need a beginner's Web space and your ISP doesn't provide you with space.

If your Web hosting needs are more sophisticated, or you're starting to "outgrow" your existing Web space, you'll probably want to look at getting Web space from a commercial "Web hosting" company. Analogous to Internet Service Providers, Web hosting companies specialize in providing space for Web pages, and can support all of the latest features, including FrontPage support, database hosting, complete CGI scripting capabilities, and the like.

Web Editor

The latest generation of Web editors finally makes it possible to produce reasonably good Web pages without much knowledge of HTML. Learning the basics of HTML is always a good idea, and will certainly help you develop better Web pages with less effort, but it’s no longer an absolute necessity for developing a simple and effective Web site.

Graphics Editor

If your Web site is going to contain graphics (and virtually every Web site should), you will need to have a graphics program that can help you optimize your images for the Web. There are a number of programs that can perform these functions:

Adobe Photoshop (PC and Mac) is the graphics professional’s power tool. There’s not much it can’t do, and it’s certainly a good tool for Web image preparation. The downside is that it’s fairly expensive ($550 retail, although Adobe has a fairly good product donation program), and may be overkill if light Web development is the only thing you need it for.

Microsoft has a number of PC image editing products. Microsoft Image Composer is a free utility that is bundled with FrontPage 98 . It has lots of nifty tools for creating and manipulating Web graphics.

Domain Name (optional)

An Internet domain name is essentially the unique, "user friendly" name for each machine connected to the Internet; they make it easy to keep track of people, organizations and businesses who use these machines for email, the World Wide Web and other Internet services. In email addresses, domain names are signified by everything after the "@" symbol in an address (i.e. in "jon@onenw.org", "onenw.org" is the domain name for the machine through which we run our emails). In Web addresses, domain names usually found after the "www," as in "www.onenw.org ," where "onenw.org" is the name of the machine on which our Web site can be found. These friendly names mask a more complex numbering system used to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of machines on the Internet.

Registering a domain name gives your Web site a unique, easily-remembered address, and can also allow your staff to have email addresses in the form user@your-organization.org.

About the Author

ONE/Northwest works to protect the environment by applying the best uses of communications technology to foster an effective and connected conservation community. ONE/Northwest provides technology consulting services to nonprofit conservation groups in Alaska, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington.