Business and industry drive many of today's markets. From hammers to hi-tech, profit is the name of the game. But what's out there for the rest of us? Hundreds of organizations out there try their best to serve the public good. Government and
educational institutions, as well as many private nonprofit companies, both serve and are served by all sectors of their respective communities. And these organizations need and can use the Internet, too! But how? Is it possible to establish a Web
presence
without a $1,000,000 budget? Can something as inexpensive and simple as e-mail help these vital businesses? This chapter answers these questions.
We've all heard the saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." Networking, in both the social and technological sense of the word, is an indispensable part of any business. For institutions and nonprofit businesses that may not have
the resources that many companies do, networking becomes even more important. This chapter focuses on Internet Explorer and how it can provide access to the World Wide Web. First, however, the following sections examine the other resources that Internet
Explorer can tap into.
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Before reading any further, you might want to review Chapter 11 on how to configure and use Internet Explorer most effectively for e-mail.
Mail, telephones, fax machines, and conferences are common tools for networking between people and organizations; e-mail is another tool that will one day be just as commonplace. E-mail is becoming more easily available and user-friendly with each
passing month. Many business cards, brochures, and letterheads today display e-mail addresses prominently. One day, an e-mail address will be as common as a phone number. But can such a tool help the public sector? Absolutely. Read on.
CAUTION
Just as with any other form of communication, there are those who would use e-mail for their own gain. Once you are online, be prepared for your share of unwanted e-mail.
Briefly, the following are a few ways e-mail can benefit public and nonprofit institutions:
Of course, the Internet offers more than personal communication. Groups of people are collectively publishing interactive electronic magazines geared to your needs. By using Internet Explorer's companion (Internet News), you can subscribe to these
magazines, called newsgroups, on the Internet. Newsgroups can put you in touch with people and resources that you need. You may want to review Chapter 13, "Using Internet News to Access Newsgroups," before continuing to make sure you are ready
to
access newsgroups.
As an example, this section looks at soc.org.nonprofit, one of the best newsgroups for nonprofits around. Discussion on this newsgroup is wide-ranging and informative. To look at this newsgroup, click on the Internet News icon on your desktop. Then
select News/Newsgroups and scroll down in the window that opens soc.org.nonprofit (newsgroups are arranged in alphabetical order) and click it. You'll find all types of helpful information for your organization in this newsgroup. As you can see in Figure
35.2, one person was able to find a great idea on fundraising by reading soc.org.nonprofit.
Remember, if you have a question about something, hundreds of others probably do, too. You never know what you'll find using Internet Explorer to access newsgroups!
Another area of the Internet that can be useful to organizations that benefit the public is Gopher (see Chapter 9, "Accessing Other Services With Internet Explorer 3.0," for more information on Gopher). With the help of Internet Explorer and
Gopher, it is possible to tap into large amounts of useful information:
There are Web servers, and then there are Web servers—those on the Internet who choose to use their space for the public good. This section shows you some of these servers. Using Internet Explorer, you can find resources both locally and
nationwide
that can help you do your good works better.
Figure 35.3 shows a Web site that provides a list of Internet resources for nonprofit service organizations. This site, housed at the University of Michigan, contains hints and helps from nonprofits, businesses, and corporations, the federal
government,
and other human services organizations.
Use Internet Explorer to go to the following address:
http://www.sils.umich.edu/~nesbeitt/nonprofits/nonprofits.html
You might also try Nonprofit Links at the following address:
http://www.pic.net/vc/npourls.htm
This site has links to thousands of resources, including pointers and indexes on volunteerism, grant writing, and fundraising in addition to a host of other topics.
If you want to find out what nonprofit and public organizations are out there, Internet NonProfit Center promises "information on more nonprofits than any other site in the world!" See them at
http://www.human.com/inc/
or
http://www.contact.org/usall.htm for state-by-state info).
If you're more interested in getting on the Net than finding out what's on it, you have several options. One of the most common forms of access public organizations use is the free-net. free-nets are often local, community-based networks that
offer a variety of access to those that may not have the resources of business or industry. free-nets offer services ranging from simple e-mail and bulletin boards to full Internet access. They are usually organized by community colleges, public
libraries,
and other public institutions.
For a truly vast listing of free-nets and other community networks in the World, visit
http://duke.usask.ca/~scottp/free.html
This site offers links to Free-Nets throughout the World. Free-Nets are organized alphabetically by country to make them easy to find. With the help of Internet Explorer, you can access many of these Free-Nets with just a click.
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If you want to create your own community-based Free-Net, the National Public Telecomputing Network's main home page at http://www.nptn.org/ is an excellent place to start.
Perhaps you are interested in establishing a Web presence for your public institution. An excellent place to start is a listing of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) worldwide. Since most ISPs also offer Web services, this could be a very valuable site:
http://www.netusa.net/ISP/
There are also many agencies, including commercial, educational, and non-profit enterprises, that are willing to help public and non-profit organizations establish a presence on the Internet. For example, if you are a disability or rehabilitation
organization, Michigan State University's REACH (Rehabilitation Education And Change) program can help get you up and running. You can visit them at the following address.
http://reach.educ.msu.edu/
Getting your own Web site—what a great idea! But how do you do it? What are some things to think about? What should you offer? This section answers these questions as it shows you how one Web site was created and continues to develop.
You've gathered your resources, you have a place to put your information, and you're ready to go. But what comes next? How do you decide what to do with your new electronic exposure? You need to answer several key questions before you start building
your Web site:
There are, of course, more questions you could ask, but if you can answer the preceding questions, you can create a well-designed and useful Web site. Keep in mind that the answers to these questions constantly change and develop over time.
The following sections answer these four questions using The Open Door Employment and Disability Network Web site created by the Michigan Jobs Commission and Michigan State University's REACH as an example (see Figure 35.4). You can find this site at
http://www.mrs.mjc.state.mi.us.
Figure 35.4. The Open Door, Web site of Michigan Jobs Commission—Rehabilitation Services.
The first question you need to answer is who your audience is. At the time The Open Door (then called MRSNet) was created, the answer to this question was simple. The Web site was created to serve the 700 counselors and staff of Michigan Rehabilitation
Services located throughout the state of Michigan. With the introduction of new legislation and a reorganization of how rehabilitation services are provided in the state, however, the site needed to expand. In fact, six months after the introduction of
MRSNet, the question was answered differently. Today, this site continues to serve the staff of Rehabilitation Services, as well as those who are involved in rehabilitation, accommodations, and related issues at the community, state, and national levels.
It now serves these new purposes as The Open Door.
A key determining factor in what is offered on a Web site has to do with the technical capabilities of its users. Exactly what equipment do our users have access to in order to make use of the Web?
For the most part, Open Door's user base (primarily novice to intermediate skill users) have 386DX or 486DX PC-compatible computers with 14.4Kbps modems for access. They call in to the Web server from more than 40 different locations throughout the
state of Michigan. Of course, as this site's audience expands, the ability to well define them becomes lost. But we still know that we have to meet the prime audience, the Rehabilitation Services staff in Michigan.
If you don't know how your main audience is going to access your site, you need to take some time to find out. Does your audience even have Internet access? If not, are you ready for a Web site? Perhaps you should start with a BBS instead. Below is a
short checklist of questions you should answer regarding your users' access capabilities:
Of course, you shouldn't allow yourself to be ruled by these answers. After all, it's every body's job to "push the envelope" a little. If, for example, your audience uses primarily 2400 baud modems, don't throw up your hands and offer a
simple text-only web page—see if you can find creative ways to get faster modems into the hands of your users. You must also think about what your audience might be using a year from now to help you make the right plans.
Before you answer the big question of what to put on your site, you must determine how many man hours you can commit to your project. This question is more important than it may at first seem. Although creating Web pages can be simple, the skill needed
to maintain and expand a site can increase a great deal over time. The Open Door was able to use the resources of one full-time person in addition to the part-time help of others in order to create and maintain the site.
This amount of time was necessary because The Open Door is more than just a Web site; it also maintains FTP and Gopher sites, e-mail, a News server, and NetForums. (See http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/nf_home for more info on this great new function.) If your site will consist mainly of a couple of pages on someone else's server, this need would decrease a great deal.
If possible, talk to an expert about how long your plans will take to implement before moving ahead. There are no hard and fast rules to follow. However, simple Web pages can be designed and finished in as little as a couple of hours. More complex
pages
that use forms, CGI scripting, and other functions can take several days or even weeks to produce.
What do you offer? And how do you offer it? For The Open Door, we took the answers to all the previous questions into consideration to answer this one. First, for us, was the issue of the capabilities of Open Door users. Because they were all going to
be dialing in to access the site, we knew graphics had to be kept to a minimum because they take up so much bandwidth. The site had to be short, simple, and to the point (see Figure 35.5).
Figure 35.5. This page is typical of the sparse amount of graphics on The Open Door Web site.
Although The Open Door has few graphics and none of the "bells and whistles" a lot of commercial sites have, that doesn't mean all public or non-profit sites are this way. At the other end of the spectrum is an educational site like the
California Distance Learning project at
http://www.otan.dni.us/cdlp/cdlp.html
Its site not only takes advantage of extensive graphics, but uses RealAudio as well.
Also, because we wanted users to get to the vital information as quickly as possible, we configured our users' Web browsers not to auto load images, which saved them additional time in gaining access to the information provided on the site.
Second, because The Open Door was mainly designed as a center for educational resources involving accommodations and rehabilitation, these types of links make up a majority of our site. We decided to offer a full range of information: the ability to
order educational materials on how to use browsers, Eudora, and other packages; products for the rehabilitation community; links to some of the best existing rehabilitation sites on the Internet; and instant access to our Gopher, FTP, and NetForum
servers.
You might want to take a few minutes to explore the site now to get a sample. We even have a feedback form for you to tell us what you think at
http://www.mrs.mjc.state.mi.us/feedback.html
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You don't want to be seen as an "Internet leech." In other words, although it's great to have lots of links to lots of other great places, it's also a good idea to give a little something back in return. Try to provide some information that nobody else has and you'll have a much better Web site.
You're just about done. Now it's time to decide how you want to arrange your information. Again, this decision can range from the simple to the complex. If you have a small site with limited information, you might fit everything on a couple of
well-constructed pages. Larger sites might have dozens of pages in different directories.
Whatever the size and organization, the key is quick and logical access to as much of your site as possible. When we first designed The Open Door, we thought it made sense to organize our information by server type. In other words, Gopher, Web, FTP,
and
other logical chunks of information all had their own pages. Later, we realized that it made more sense to organize our material by category, such as Education and Accommodations.
CAUTION
Long Web pages are generally a bad idea. They take longer to download and can be harder to navigate than several shorter, well-organized pages.
A second goal was to make sure that each user could quickly get to any area with relative ease. We put a menu of possibilities at the bottom of each page, as shown in Figure 35.6. Because we made our Web pages short enough, this offers access to the
entire site from any page. You'll also notice that there are text links for users with nongraphical browsers.
Figure 35.6. The Open Door offers instant access to anywhere on its site with a single click.
As you begin to think about your organization's role on the Internet, this chapter has hopefully been of some help. If you are able to think about, and answer, some of the questions posed here, you should be well on your way to creating and maintaining
a useful and informative presence on the Net. The next chapter outlines some current Internet trends and makes some predictions about where this technology, and Internet Explorer, might be heading.
