Need Help Building Sites

Where can I find help?

[FTW]

Can anyone suggest locations where I might locate some people to assist in building a major not for profit web site, in return for the experience and having their name on the sites?
I am mainly interested in people that have some knowledge of MySQL, PHP, and Perl, as well as using mirror sites.

There are currently three separate domain names and I will be using mirror sites located on different hosting services, to help cover any potential down times on any one server.
Thanks for any input.
FTW

[oilman]

Hi FTW - welcome to wmw.

I'd recommend giving a call to some of the web design firms in your vicinity. Many of them may do some non-profit work from time to time for local charities. I'm not sure of your setup but if it's possible for you to issue a tax receipt that can be a good incentive for some folks to get involved. In my experience it's usually the smaller companies of the 'one-man-show' types that are most open to charity work.

Another idea is to contact a technical school in your area like a DeVry or ITT Tech. Often a student group will take on your project as part of a class project. You'll have to make a bit of a presentation to a professor or two to give some validity to your stuff so you can get it on the list of projects but it can be well worth the time and effort.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Getting someone else to do it is easy too, even international designers

All it needs is to be put on to a CD and posted to you

[FTW]

The idea of contacting a local web design company wouldn't work in my case. I live in small town USA and we don't even have a traffic light, much less a web design company.

As for the schools, that is a great idea. I have already been scouting various university boards on the web, and will continue to do so.

The biggest problem I have is not enough time. I am already working 16 to 18 hours per day/night on this project. In the last two months, I have written and designed over 600 pages for one of the sites and that has not even touched the tip of the iceberg.

[brotherhood of LAN]

get someone to put it into a database for you, and reduce your role in the site to just data entry (the content of the pages)

[brotherhood of LAN]

get someone to put it into a database for you, and reduce your role in the site to just data entry (the content of the pages)

[tedster]

How about the members of the non-profit itself? I work with one such site, and we've created a work flow that accommodates lots of in-house volunteer help.

[FTW]

Finding someone to help set up a database, is one of the things I am trying to do. I have already started editing gedcom files, so they can be converted into csv, then uploaded into MySQL, but I had not thought about the possibility of putting the entire site into a database.

I know it would work for the thousands of photographs we will be posting, but I am not sure if it would work for "feature stories" containing 5,000 to 10,000 words each. That is one area I will have to do some research on.
Thanks for the idea.

[brotherhood of LAN]

You could just use memo fields for your long documents. This is quoting from MS Access

"A Text field can store up to 255 characters a memo field can store up to 65,536 characters. Whats the average word size of the document? No doubt its around 5, meaning a 10 000 word document would indeed fit. If it didnt you could always split it into two fields

Use templates for these documents, ie themes. Do you have a copy of MS Frontpage? There is a FP extension where you could upload files, i.e. graphics and templates. All text, alteration of anything database driven can be done online..i.e. by more than one person

Its worth considering :)