One day, a friend asks you if you could help them make a simple web site. Your friend said it would be great if it could include things like a blog, photo gallery, maybe an online calendar. Maybe your friend’s in a band and wants to have a mailing list and an online calendar. Or they’re a budding artist and want a photo gallery to show off their work. Pretty understandable requests, and pretty common features (nowadays).

However, you have a dilemma. Your friend doesn’t have a ton of cash, and you don’t have a ton of time. While you could build all those features from scratch, that could take a while. You want to make sure that you don’t undertake a project that could spiral from hours into days of work. But you don’t want to send your friend packing, and there’s got to be a lot of free or almost-free stuff out there that you can stick together, right?

Yep, there sure is. Here are some things that I found or used before:

• Use Google Apps for Domains. It provides everything a basic site could need — email, calendar, a page editor, and some attractive (albeit a bit generic) page templates allowing someone to build a site in a WYSIWYG way. I didn’t see a way to upload a custom page template, but you can edit the HTML of the page “sections” in order to embed stuff like YouTube videos or whatever. I like WYSIWYG editors because it means that you can make your friend work on & enhance the site, instead of you having to make every tweak. Note that you can use Google Apps just for email and calendar — you don’t have to use it for web pages if you don’t want to.
• Use a cheap web host. The cheapest I’ve found is E-rice, but it’s very no-frills. GoDaddy has basic plans for $3+/mo that include PHP, MySQL, email, and a number of ready-to-install apps (blogs, forums, CMSes, photo galleries, etc.) for Linux or Windows hosting plans (Linux has way more freebies). Dreamhost is a bit more expensive and also offers one-click installs for blogs, CMSes, wikis, photo galleries, etc. The free add-on apps available for GoDaddy and Dreamhost accounts are nice, because if you want to include those features later on, you don’t have to mess with installation. If you’re trying to decide between Linux and Windows, I’d suggest going with Linux/PHP plans, since there’s a lot of free/open source PHP code out there that you could include in the site later. And PHP is fun. 🙂 
• Use a blogging service like Blogger or WordPress or Typepad. They offer lots of templates (althoguh you can make your own), you can have them on your own domain, they often offer embeddable widgets, and they’re cheap or free. Great for a basic personal or family site. Plus, a blog-driven site means that your friend is in control of the content, which is a good thing. 🙂
• If you don’t want to use a pre-existing blog template, you can use open source web templates from oswd or OpenWebDesign. Some require attribution, but all are free. Andreas Viklund also linked to some open source templates here and here.
• You can include free stock art from stock.xchng or flickr. For stock.xchng, all the stock art is free, although some photos require you get the author’s permission and/or provide attribution. Note that stock.xchng often includes non-free samples from Stockxpert.com in the search results, so be careful where you click. For “free” stock art on flickr: 1) do a search, 2) click “advanced search”, 3) check “only search within creative commons-licensed photos”, and 4) re-perform the search. You’ll see photos on flickr available under the Creative Commons license, which means you must try to obtain permission and provide attribution (e.g. a link somewhere on your site saying “city photos courtesy of Mike Smith”). There’s also a “stock” group in flickr where you can find photos.
• For photo galleries, you can include widgets & links from flickr. Photobucket has a nice photo album widget that makes it easy to add a photo album to your site. Or you could pay $40-60/year for a clicker, more integrated photo gallery from SmugMug. Or use any number of open source photo galleries (DreamHost & GoDaddy offer one-click installs if you have Linux hosting).
• You can use Google Calendar to track and share online events (good for band, bar, etc web sites), and embed it into your site. If you’re using Google Apps, embedding it is as easy and clicking the “add widget” link. Otherwise you have to go through a few more steps, but it’s still easy. 30 boxes is another very nice online calendar, and they have a nice “Share” button in the upper left that makes embedding your calendar in your web site a snap (click “Add to Blog”). Nitpick to 30 boxes: maybe rename that link from “Add to Blog” to “Add to Blog / Web Site” ?
• You can run a simple mailing list/discussion group using Google Groups or Yahoo Groups. Google Groups has added some neat new features lately.
• You can find other easy-to-embed widgets (e.g. local weather, latest news, games, a clock(?) )for your web site at WidgetBox or Google Gadgets. Like this weather thingy:

So there’s the high level bullet point deal. Now you can help your friends and neighbors put together some basic sites while minimizing the risk of it becoming an ongoing project.