Creating a website

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Permalink Reply by Carissa Dollar on December 6, 2009 at 4:09pm

PTAblocks.com is FREE!

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Permalink Reply by Kirk Corless on December 6, 2009 at 9:39pm

I use a website company for my high school alumni called myevent.com through a partner websiteworks.com. It is a 7 day free trial to try it out and the costs range from 14.95 to 30.00 a month. Websiteworks.com gives you all the tools you need to create a website from the ground up, it is extremely easy to use. I highly recommend it.

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Permalink Reply by PTA Administrator on December 10, 2009 at 9:01am

The Great Idea Bank is built on the Ning.com platform. National PTA can't really recommend one service over another, but this is a fairly robust, easy to use and low-cost platform.

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Permalink Reply by denise on December 15, 2009 at 7:15pm

we started on this year so that we would have easier access to the information and we would have the benefit of being able to post information that is PTA related that might not be able to be posted on a school web site. We searched our parents for someone with the background to build a web site. We finally got a parent who was able and will to do it for free and as a volunteer! She has been wonderful. We looked at other web sites to decide the look and information we wanted to build the site. Then we bought the our name domaine and building blocks through godaddy.com . It was about $300 to get it up started up and it was for 3 years. It has been great, and useful to both our parents/students and PTA.

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Permalink Reply by Nathan Ward on January 21, 2010 at 7:52am

I manage the website for our PTA (www.churchillroadpta.org). We use DotNetNuke (see www.dotnetnuke.com) hosted by DiscountASP.net (www.discountasp.net). It cost about $200 per year for the hosting service. Someone else set it up before I got involved, but I now manage the website. Seems like a pretty good solution although I haven't evaluated other solutions since this was already in place. I've heard of people using Druples for content management and The Groupery looks like an interesting website that you could and is free to use The Groupery (www.thegroupery.com).

If you end up using DotNetNuke, I could give you some pointers. I spent some time looking into and selecting a solution within DotNetNuke for online payments, which we have just recently started doing. Additional functionality can be added to DotNetNuke by developing DotNetNuke "modules." There are a number of open source modules and many more that you can purchase. We purchased a module for online payments for $140. There is a free event registration module that comes with DotNetNuke, but it did not provide some of the functionality that we need. I haven't seen any modules that provided management of committee members and volunteers although I haven't looked real hard. It was fairly easy for me, since I am a programmer, to develop some simple modules myself for entering and displaying this information. You have to know or learn ASP.NET programming if you want to write your own modules.

While the National PTA can't recommend a certain solution for this, I am surprised that there isn't a separate forum for "website management" since it can really reduce the amount of time consuming paperwork and everyone needs to do it. It would be great if there was a summary of different solutions that people have used in enough detail to help someone who is just getting started.

Nathan

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Permalink Reply by Jessica Koenig on January 21, 2010 at 6:38pm

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply, I will look into all of this!

Jessica

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