Websites for DECs

No matter how small the county - every DEC should have an effective web presence. This is one area where many DECs fall short. Websites are viewed as an amenity rather than an essential. These vital pieces of infrastructure will only become more important as time goes on. This is because more and more people are using the Internet as a means of getting their information, staying informed, shopping, meeting people, and having fun.

DECs have to evolve with the times. Good websites can yield significant results for DECs in terms of volunteer recruitment, contributions, network development, and keeping your supporters well informed and up to date.

What stops many DECs from building a website is the potential complexity and cost. This is only true to some degree. If you're familiar with navigating the web, and using Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel (possibly Access) - then you can probably maintain a website.

Building one isn't that complex, either. The only real technical knowledge you may need is a bit of knowledge of HTML, and possibly (though not likely) in CSS. You can learn all the things you need to know and more about HTML and CSS here.

You can certainly build a website purely on HTML and CSS, but that would take a lot of time. There are several packages out there which can do most of the work for you - you just have to fill in the spaces. The package I recommend is Drupal. With this book on Drupal, installing and configuring is easy, easy, easy.

This is what we're doing with the Marion DEC website, which should be released at the end of the summer. I'll talk more about things you can do with a good DEC website later today.