Websites
Plain, fast websites for nonprofits, community groups and small practices. Built by hand on my own machine, handed over as files you own, running on hosting that costs nothing.
Right now I am doing these at no cost
I am building a body of work, and I would rather build it for organizations doing something useful than for practice projects nobody visits. You get a real site. I get a real reference and your honest opinion of how it went.
What free covers: the design, the build, moving your content over, and getting it live on your own address. What it does not cover: your domain name, which costs about twelve dollars a year and stays in your name, and any service you already pay for, like a donation processor or a mailing list.
Those tools rent you a website. Stop paying and it disappears. What I build is a folder of files: your words, your pictures, your pages. If you ever want to move it somewhere else, or hand it to somebody else, you can, because you have it.
Pages, text and images come across by hand. Exports from those tools are never complete, so this is the part that takes the time.
Old page addresses are kept or redirected, so search results and anything printed still land in the right place.
The parts that change often, like events and news, get a simple admin screen. No code, no training day.
No subscription, no plan tiers, no upsell email when your trial ends.
Three sites I build and look after. All of them run on hosting that costs nothing, and all of them are plain files their owners could take elsewhere tomorrow.
Irish Network New Orleans. A nonprofit with an events calendar the board edits, a members area with logins and cards, a community story collection, and a board portal.
A New Orleans krewe. Hand-lettered type, a members' door, and the parade year laid out so newcomers can find their way in.
An artist's site, built around the work rather than around a template, with the pictures at the size they deserve.
in-nola.org is a volunteer-run nonprofit site I build and maintain. It has an events calendar the board updates themselves, a members area with logins and cards, a community story collection members write into, and a board portal.
It runs for the price of the domain. Everything else, the hosting, the forms, the email forwarding, costs nothing.
| What it costs to run | Per year |
|---|---|
| Domain name | about $12 |
| Hosting | $0 |
| Contact forms and email forwarding | $0 |
| Events and member system | $0 |
For comparison, a Squarespace plan runs a few hundred dollars a year, every year, for as long as you want the site to exist.
Most small sites take a couple of weeks of evenings, not months.
I started out in a clinic detox center, then worked community based services, adolescent therapy, and a dropout prevention program. Then I became a teacher. I have more than a decade in the classroom now, all of it in New Orleans public schools.
I build because of what those rooms never had. No working network in the computer lab, so I built one. No tools for teaching data science the way it ought to be taught, so I built those, and my own students use them daily. I sit on the board of Irish Network New Orleans as their data manager, where I built and still run the site, the events system and the members area.
What I keep noticing is how much good work gets quietly taxed. A krewe, a nonprofit, an artist, a small practice, each paying a few hundred dollars a year to rent a page describing work they are already struggling to fund. That money should go to the thing they actually care about. So I build the site, hand over the files, and step back. The running cost is a domain name. The rest is theirs.
I am a licensed clinical social worker, license 11349, and I teach high school math in New Orleans.