[ Home | Events | Safety Alerts | News | Education ]
The Internet boom of the late 90's brought with it hundreds of public safety related web sites... many were even useful and some offered free services. Many of these sites are now gone, or no longer updated. At this site, I try to include links to the best public safety & health related sites that are active and relatively current, as well as links to all NJ EMS, Fire, MICU, Police, OEM organizations and hospitals. If you come across a good site that has not been mentioned here, please Email me the information, and I'll include the link.
Since 2002, most of the organizations that offered free web hosting have discontinued free services or shut down altogether.
As a result, many EMS and Fire agencies were left without a web site.
A good web site can be very beneficial to an organization in terms of public relations, fund raising and even membership recruitment. More than half of the membership applications coming into my primary first aid squad are received via their web site. Some organizations even accept contributions online. Many others also maintain private "members only" sections of their site to hold scheduling, SOPs and training information.
There are still a few places on the web that offer free sites. While most require a pop-up or banner ad to help pay for the service, this is often a good first step and is generally better than not having an internet presence at all. To set up a free web site for your organization try theses:
Tripod.com is the host if this site. You can choose between a pop-up ad delivered on your first page visit or a static banner ad on each page. This is a good service and includes both easy to use web page creation tools as well as a good File Manager for the HTML guru.
Yahoo!GeoCities also offers good online page creation tools. Pages here include an integrated banner ad rather than a pop-up.
Angelfire Now part of the TerraLycos network, Angelfire offers good online page creation tools and less intrusive ads. Disk space on the free account is limited.
All of these services offer a variety of upgrades for a fee. Upgrades include, turning off ads, custom domain names and additional disk space. As with any free web site, there is always a chance that the service will be discontinued with little or no notice. If you use a free service, be sure to save all site content stored on a local PC or disk.
Eventually, you'll want a professionally hosted web site over which you have complete control and that uses a domain name of your choosing (such as yoursquadname.org). Such sites usually include the option of email accounts (ie. membername@yoursquadname.org). Hilltop Associates, sponsor of this site offers discounted web hosting packages and domain name registrations to volunteer EMS and Fire organizations. Take 20% off any of these web hosting plans. All plans include an easy to use online control panel, POP3 Email accounts and SPAM filtering. Domain name registration is available for as little as $15 per year.
[ Home | Events | Safety Alerts | News | Education ]
© 2003 John Staunton