One of the side projects I’ve been working on is building a new website for India House Houston, a non-profit community center. The site’s new home is:
If you’ve never been to the building, here’s what it looks like:
It’s located in Southwest Houston near Beltway 8 and 59 (8888 West Bellfort, 77031 to be exact).
The interesting thing about the website: Initially, I had planned to hire someone to configure a Joomla site for the organization. But then I remembered I could create a site with Google Sites. It turns out that Google Sites has become more and more featured so you can build a reasonable brochureware type of website with it. In my opinion, the beauty of this is there’s all this great integration with all of the Google services. Stuff like:
* Google Webmaster Central
* Google Analytics
* Google Sitemaps (Google Sites automatically generates a sitemap when you’re Google Site is set to be accessible to the outside world).
* Google Docs and Picasa albums integration (“gadgets” make it really easy to embed these in your Google Site)
As a content management system, it no doubt has it’s shortcomings. But for getting started quickly with as little effort as possible, it totally hits the mark.
Anyhow, the site is definitely under construction, but I have people adding content to it and before the end of this week, it should at least be “content & feature complete”.
Cool, thanks for sharing these pics. What sort of programs have you gone to there?
I’ve mostly been to talks there. Political people or religious people (actually saw your Dad at one of these last week). My friend runs the medical clinic and they see a bunch of patients mostly for free every week. They offer free yoga classes three times a week. Senior citizens have regular events there. They haven’t been very visible (IMO) but it’s a really great building and has quite a bit of good programming already. If you have ideas for other stuff lmk, I’m on the board and interested new ideas from outsiders.
no ideas, but i remember when the plans came out that they were going to have a performance space. wish it had been there when i lived in houston! sounds like a great building for the indian community.
There’s a proper performance space that’s planned for phase 2, but in the meanwhile, the 18,000 square foot building has a room (or rooms) that could house a small performance.