Cheap & Easy Web Tools for Individuals, Non-Profits and Small Business

Having a web presence is critical to any organization that needs to present a face to the public. Too many organizations veer away from having a web site because of perceived complexity and cost. Happily there are free/inexpensive and easy-to-use tools available to do this. 

Following is the list of tools that I've come up with for my personal use and for use with non-profits and small businesses. 

There are a lot of tools out there and more arriving every day, so if you find a better tool, please let me know. I'll update my list and give credit where credit is due.

Jimdo provides non-profits, small businesses and invididuals with an inexpensive, easy-to-use, yet flexible tool to establish a web presence. It's the one on which this site is hosted and is also the one I used to quickly develop a site for Christ's Community in College Hill. It's simple and powerful and cheap (free or less than $100 a year). 

Many people will be able to use this tool to set up their own site, and most pc users will be able to maintain a site once it is set up. I'm available to set up sites for those who don't want to do it themselves.

This is a fast-developing area, as evidenced by the plethora of options becoming available, and Jimdo may not survive, but anything developed on Jimdo will be easily ported to whatever alternative wins in the end.

Constant Contact is a web package that makes it easy to create and publish a good-looking eNewsletter.  It's not free, but, compared with other packages, it's surprisingly inexpensive. It handles maintenance of your mailing list and can get your eNewsletter through most spam filters.  For examples of my use of Constant Contact, see the College Hill eNewsletter and eGraceNotes.

Click2mail is a surprisingly reasonable way to do USPS mailings. Using this service gets a break on postage cost which may make this service cost less than doing it yourself.  For example, as of August, 2009, sending 25 or more full color postcards cost 43 cents per card; sending 10 or more 2-page letters is 66 cents per. 

To use the service, you go online, set up an account, copy your text & pictures into their templates, upload your mailing list, then click & it gets mailed out within a couple of days. 

Picasa provides a free way to share photos on the web as well as to manage pictures on your pc. I have used Picasa to do simple edits on virtually every one of the thousands of  photos I have on my pc. Photos on your pc can be uploaded to Picasa Photo Albums for others to see.  These albums can be made part of an web site. For examples, see here and here. 

For more complex photo editing, I use paint.net (see below).

Blogger (free) can be used to make documents available on the web. You can then link to the documents you've stored in blogger from your website. For an example of this use, see here.  To ease the reformatting of documents, I found Windows Live Writer to be very helpful. 

Google provides a free calendar of that can be used as a standalone page or which can be incorporated into a page on your web site. It can be easily maintained by mere mortals. For an example of this use, see here. 

Statcounter is an improvement over the web statistics provided by most hosts.  (Jimdo provides this functionality.)

Master.com provides a free way to create an index to your website that doesn't depend on whether or not Google has decided to index all your pages. For an example, see box at the bottom of the page here.  (An ideal website development/hosting package would provide this function.)

It's cheap and has caused me no problems.  Jimdo and many other web hosting services provide this function, at least for your primary domain name. I use Namecheap to register other domain names that I then forward to a primary domain.  For example, I registered gracecollegehill.com and then forward anyone who goes there to gracecollegehill.org. 

Paint.net (note that the url is http://www.getpaint.net/ ) is a free package that's easy to learn, yet has the power to handle most picture editing needs. I love it!  Between Paint.net and Picasa, I hardly ever have to resort to the overly-complex Photoshop.

Pando makes it easy to send large pictures or videos or whole collections of pictures or other files without running aground of email system limitations.  It's easy, free, and fast.

Bluehost.com (not bluehost.net) or Namecheap.com are inexpensive services I've used to develop websites "from scratch," using Frontpage (now obsolete).  I settled on these after trying and being disappointed by several. You don't need this if you're using a packaged service like Jimdo.