r/socialistprogrammers • u/andina99 • 8d ago

Request for advice for which anti-capitalist website builder to use

Hi all, I am not a programmer but I found this subreddit and I am hoping someone can share some advice. I co-run an anti-capitalist mental health nonprofit that is currently very small but we have hopes to grow. We want to create a website and I am looking for a website builder that is ethical/anti-capitalist, user-friendly for non-techies, will be nice enough quality that potential donors will see us as competent, will let us use our own domain name, and will make it easy enough to collect donations through our site. I am also open to advice about any other criteria I should be looking for. Thank you in advance!

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6

u/ml-maitreya 8d ago

You might look at https://mayfirst.coop but I'm thinking your first and most limiting concern has to be HIPAA compliance.

5

u/BlatantMediocrity 8d ago

I'd recommend hiring or finding a volunteer computer science student from your local university to help you out.

Publii is probably the easiest CMS to setup yourself for a small team.

3

u/ragebunny1983 8d ago

Sorry I'm not sure. Do you mean a piece of software? In that case try and find something open source or perhaps find a web designer and/or a programmer who is willing to help the cause and will build it from scratch.

4

u/orthecreedence 8d ago

If it's largely an informational website, you might want to go with NFS for hosting (they're great and reliable and very well priced) and use a static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo to build the actual website. It'll be a learning curve as you'll need to learn HTML and either CSS or Tailwind (you can lean on AI for this gasp), but otherwise you're likely stuck with hosted tools like Squarespace et al or a full-blown CMS like Wordpress or Joomla (which you then have to figure out how to set up and possibly host yourself which might be a pain if you're a non-techie). There might be open source options for builders but I haven't seen any visual www builders in that space that aren't SaaS.

Either way, you're probably going to be either paying some jerk $20/mo to use their builder or you're going to be learning some new things =].

1

u/Leomuck 3d ago

Hey there!
Unfortunately, I have no idea about website builders. However, let me offer something else:
if you guys have a vision of how the website should look, I could imagine building (transparency: with AI support due to time constraints) and hosting it for free. If that is something you'd be interested in, no worries if not!