Web design & hosting forum: website building tool recommendations?

The volunteers who will be creating & maintaining the sites are new to computers/internet (mostly seniors 65-80).

What may seem simple (or low bar) to you may overwhelm the volunteers.

It would be great to find something that is extremely non-techie user friendly.

I understand what you are encouraging, however the volunteers have already expressed no desire to go near HTML.

They want to move boxes & play with templates. If < > is involved forget about it.

One volunteer wants to go with the template packages at GoDaddy, but the association does not want to authorize the monthly expense.

My task is to find a handful of potential solutions with associated costs for them to vote on.

Thanks for all of your suggestions.

They would like to stay ad free which the zero cost GeoCities is not.
Also they already have a domain/hosting paid for the year. Originally I was looking to find a solution with that in mind.

Perhaps they should just switch hosts and go with the template pkg on GoDaddy or Yahoo GeoCities. The cost (ad free, with email & hosting) are about the same.

depending on the host, what about going with a CMS like Joomla, mambo, or any others people might suggest.

It's what I use for my clients who quickly want to add and edit certain content. It doesn't get any easier than Wordpress (which also has the fexibility if they choose to someday).

~Sovereign

For internet 2.0 sites the best is Joomla... Mambo was leave without updates since 2006.
With Joomla you can build forums using Fireboard extension for Joomla. For interactive pages, let the users write opinions, you can use Jommla Comments, another extension. To play photos you can use the Frontpage Slideshow.
There are hundred of templates, extension for languajes, etc, etc.

I forgot to mention - HotDoodle is also a CMS (content management system)

I'm not sure what your organizations need a website for, but on HotDoodle you could do stuff like have a contact form, allow people to register and sign up for a newsletter that you can broadcast straight through the website, have a PayPal button that allows others to donate, you get your own email addresses.

You can also set different levels of permissions, so lower level officers are only allowed to edit certain parts of the site while administrators have full control.

If your non-profit organization was for a community of people, you could allow people to register, and your website would automatically give them a member page that they have access to editing, and can upload their picture and put in a biography of themselves, a message board, and whatnot.

Again, this is all possible without coding or HTML, like you wanted.

I feel that grown-ups would like Joomla or WordPress, they are pretty simple to use.

Geocities are thing of the past now, Yahoo! will close it before the end of this year. I guess they are not profiting from it anymore.

I would add, that Joomla has a good Video Tutorial on Lynda.com. It's very easy to understand and good for senior citizens.

For WordPress, there are many videos at Youtube you can use as teaching aids. They are all free.

Good luck.