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SUGGESTION -- NO FRILLS WEB PAGES FOR COMMUNITY SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS

by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express

From Internet-on-a-Disk #18, September 1996

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim electronic copies of this article for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to: seltzer@samizdat.com

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If you belong to a community service organization and have an Internet account that provides you with space for your own Web pages, you should consider creating pages for that organization.

Enter brochures, booklets, newsletters, meeting schedules, contact information, etc. Provide a place for members to share experiences and information with one another. Keep it simple. Go with plain text (no graphics). (For details on how to create such pages as easily as doing a word processing document, see "Low-Tech Web-Page Design" from our last issue, now at http://www.samizdat.com/lowtech.html).

If you have the time and inclination, take active steps to let people knowthat your page exists. (For tips on how to do that, see "How to publicize Web Sites over the Internet" at http://www.samizdat.com/public.html)

If you don't have time for that, then simply connect to AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com/) and submit your URL there. Then many people seraching for your kind of organization will be able to find you.

My wife and I took this approach with Prescription Parents, a support group for parents of children born with cleft lip/cleft palate. We posted the basic organization info, several booklets, and pointers to related organizations. We get about 50 visits per month to those pages, mostly from people who need the information and who otherwise would have had to request booklets by snail mail (if they were lucky enough to find the right address), and would have had to wait a week or two to get them. (Keep in mind that it costs us nothing when folks retrievethese booklets online, while otherwise it would cost us time and money to reprint them and send them these same requesters.)

Every month, several of those visitors have unique specific questions that they send us by email, and we do our best to answer. Since ours is a local Boston-area organization and the Web reaches the world, our replies are sometimes pointers to related organizations.

All in all, at no cost, and for a minimum investment of time, we're able to extend the benefits of our organization to a much broader audience. 

Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

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