Thanks JHB --

Great stuff that I'm sure will be interesting for many.

Tim

Thanks. There are a lot of really easy webhosting sites. These day's it's seriously not much more complicated that using Word.

If I find extra time, I might play around with other options. That is one really good thing about having an alias domain. I could move the website anywhere and they'd still just type www.cougarcelebration.com.

For now, it's working and I have way too many other tasks on my list. But thanks for the referral.

I don't know if it would work for you, especially since your site is already set up, but I recently set up a website for our PTA using www.webs.com and it was amazingly simple even for someone who knows very little about the tech side of things.

If you'd like to see our site visit: www.wmepta.webs.com

The simplicity of the name was definitely one of the factors in choosing webs.com!

I didn't want to make the initial message too long, so let me discuss the issues/challenges here.

PayPal Account - initially I set it up as the medium level (Premier?) which means you can use credit cards, but the person still has to be a PayPal member. I had to change that to the Business level because I meant to have the option where they don't have to log in to PayPal. There was also some back and forth where I had to justify categorizing ourselves as Charitable. (We are not a 501(c)(3). Our organization type is unincorporated association, which isn't one of their options. Normally they'd want the IRS paperwork, but we worked out information to their satisfaction. (Actually, I'm glad they are watching this.)

Donate Button - this was the biggie. Creating the button is really simple. Go through a few simple little steps in their wizard, cut and paste to your website. (and they have other types of payment buttons also). But we quickly found during testing that it worked great with Firefox or Chrome, but really iffy with Internet Explorer. I spent a huge amount of time on the phone with PayPal 3 different times with no luck. Finally, I posted the problem on a tech board and someone far more savvy than me figured it out. I don't understand the specifics, but it has to do with the way Google Sites works and handles frames/forms that PayPal needs. Firefox and Chrome work anyway. But IE usually errors out. However, all the button does is create a pretty "face" for the link that takes you to Paypal (and your specific payment account). If I'd been a commercial site trying to sell stuff, I would have pursued it further. For us, I decided to simply post the link on our website with instructions to cut and paste the link if the user got an error when they clicked the Donate button.

Domain (URL) - if we were going to be in existence for a long time, I'd look into this further. Maybe link from the school site and direct people THERE and say "click on the XYZ link" or explore other website hosting services and names or other ways to subscribe/buy the domain for longer periods of time. But for us, for one year, $17 was great. I briefly considered buying other versions (like "Cougar" spelled with an "er"). If I were in business, those variations would be important as you want to get people to your site no matter what. For us, those options were a bit too extravagant.

I thought I'd played about every role imaginable with parent groups, but this last week I entered the tech side with a vengeance. We have a Project Graduation group that will only be in existence through next summer. In that time, we'll do massive fundraising. To facilitate this, we needed to put the web presence together quickly. I share this because some of you may be interested in the pieces.

Communications - Yahoo Group (my preference is Google Groups, but other 3 groups use Yahoo, so...) - Free

Email - established generic email addresses on G-Mail and set them to forward to our personal email accounts. (We'll be doing massive mailings and didn't want to use our individual email addresses for that or to listo on the website. - Free

Website - setup a site on Google Sites (which I had never even been in). Very easy. Not much harder than using Word. (free)

Paypal - arrange a Business level account that will allow us to take donations via Paypal or major credit cards. Pretty easy technically, they have a wizard that creates the code for a DONATE or PAY button and you just copy/paste onto your website. (I'll post a second message about issues.) Cost - nothing to setup. 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.

Easier Web Name (Domain) - the Google site had a pretty cumbersome URL (address). Coming in from a link is no problem, but if you every have to tell/spell it out verbally, it's a pain. So - really stretching my comfort zone - I bought a catchier name from GoDaddy.Com. Actually I bought 2 versions, so if you type either, it takes you to our website. I needed tech support to help get it just right, but it wasn't hard to configure. One phone call and they talked me through it. Cost $17 for two names for one year. (Note there are additional services, like a privacy shield you can buy. I didn't.)

It's been an experience.

Real URL: sites.google.com/site/cougarcelebration2010/
Domains we bought: www.cougarcelebration.com and www.cougarcelebration2010.com

I'll detail some issues below.