Generally there are three areas to think about in developing a website:
Maintenance and development of a website becomes an issue when web designers and developers are in short supply. There may be years where a qualified web developer is not around, so it’s important that a website is made with existing web templates and software that makes updating a website as easy as posting to a blog.
Financial cost comes into play when a group is looking to save money. However, spending less money comes with a different set of issues. While you might be able to share web space with an existing group, you might, for example, sacrifice the ease in website development and maintenance.
Persistent data is also problematic when an organization changes web developers every year. The most common thing that happens is that the web developer redevelops the entire website, and does an incomplete migration of old data, or even the eradication of old data. This makes historical content inaccessible.
When developing a website, you will have to prioritize what is most important to you. Web developers have honed different practices in an attempt to address the issues mentioned.
If ease in development and maintenance is important, you might simply want to use a blog such as Xanga or Blogger; or perhaps use a mailing list such as Google Groups or Yahoo! Groups to keep the public informed about your organizational events. It might not be the most pretty, but it gets the job done, and that’s what you want to focus on first and foremost.
If you can afford a bit of time and money to develop and maintain a nicer website, you might want to look into getting your own domain name and web space, such as from Homestead. Homestead has hundreds of templates; you need only provide your content, and not know the knick-knacks of HTML code.
If cost is an issue, you might want to ask a sister/mother organization to cut some web space for you. While you do get space, it might not have the frills of pre-built templates that Homestead provides. But in most cases you have the advantage of installing web software that utilizes PHP, CGI, or ASP.NET (provided you understand what these scripting languages are). These software are otherwise known as Content Management Systems, and they give you a high degree of automation in maintaining the website. On the flip side, because of the heavy use of code, it might be harder to customize or update. Succeeding web developers have been known to scrap Content Management Systems because they couldn’t understand how to work with it.
When asking for shared space from another organization, you will have a relationship with the web administrator of that group. This might be an advantage in that you can get expert advice from that person. It might be a disadvantage if you need something done with your website and that person doesn’t respond to your emails.
Data persistence is an issue when history is important to the collective memory of an organization, such as videos or photos. Most problems with data persistence has to do with successive web developers redeveloping the website from scratch and not migrating old content completely. Or sometimes the content lies on multiple websites, and there is no page that collects all of the links to these heterogeneous sources.
If your web developers are keen on developing a new site from scratch every year, I normally follow a standard practice of putting my website into a folder with the year on it, such as http://conference.unavsa.org/2007. The root web address merely forwards to that location. The next year, I would create a new folder and develop in there. Through this method, a very plain index page is needed to access old websites.
If your content is located across different systems (such as YouTube, Smugmug, Flickr, Facebook, etc), you should make it a habit to place links to the content onto a webpage for future reference. You should assume that future web developers will not know where all the old content are placed, so make it easier for them to find it by creating a plain index page for repositories of content.