I first heard about Bark Communications from a mega-church pastor in Columbus, Ohio. I was suggesting Clover, which is a good website development engine in and of itself. (It’s still the tool we use here at Team Expansion, in fact. Learn more about Clover at
http://www.cloversites.com/f/friendsofbrigada
Clover gives you lots of great tools so your site can look and be organized, simple, and attractive. But if you are thinking you might have multiple users, Clover is limited. (Each site offers only one user name.) For a larger organization, that’s kind of limiting — if everything has to go through one person.
Sure you could use open source tools, but — having used two or three of those over time, I can tell you first hand, it’s not easy. Some of the changes you’ll want to make… Some of the cool features you’ll want to incorporate…. well, let’s just say — it’s a chore.
Enter Bark Communications.
http://business.barkbuilder.com/index.cfm?amaffid=13556&amsiteid=13556
Bark gives you (right out of the box) an amazingly versatile toolbox with features that will excite your fancy — and inform your constituents. For an example, check out what we’ve done so far at…
Keep in mind, there’s not a single graphic arts person represented in any of that site. We’re all volunteers in U4theU … and we’ve done the entire site in our spare time between normal responsibilities in our respective missions and churches. It’s all been done by lay people who have no clue about creative arts. But Bark is good enough that it helps you with everything from multiple contributors (and their stories), embedded videos, lots of nice banners (and even ads, if you want), newsletter forms, and even a fairly decent bulk emailer. The list is practically endless — photo tools, staff pages, donor tools, news pages, audio/video/media engines, lots of pre-designed templates (to keep you out of design trouble), and tons more. And one of the greatest factors is — it’s affordable. Check it out at the link above. (And — truthfully — if you decide to sign on, part of your sign-on fee becomes a gift to Brigada. But keep in mind, we subscribed and began using Bark Communications because it was good. Then, months afterward, we asked the designers — how do we refer this to others. They literally had to invent a way. So it wasn’t a marketing deal. It was one beggar telling another where to find bread.) (Steve, thanks again for recommending Radiant Tools and their Bark non-profit division.)
I looked into the Radiant Tools Bark platform for website building and it was easy to use and comprehensive (has nice tools for those concerned about graphics related issues). But to use all the tools I would want would make that product too expensive for me. I use http://www.weebly.com – very cheap to buy the pro version but maybe not quite as nice as Bark.