Wordpress.com allows free signups just like LJ does, and just like LJ you get your journal/blog name as part of the URL: ladysprite.wordpress.com.
As of this moment, btw, 1day4charity.wordpress.com and onedayforcharity.wordpress.com are both available. If either of those works for you, you might want to jump on it.
As I said above, WP will do 95% of what you want. It will happily be a website for you instead of a blog (here is a wordpress.com website of a colleague of mine; he retains a vestigial blog, but it can be turned off entirely if you want), so long as what you want doesn't go beyond 1) showing people webpages, 2) presenting people with a form through which they can contact you, and 3) some built in social media widgets.
You said you wanted mostly just a welcome page, FAQ, list of links and resources, and a place where people can sign up. A bunch of pages and a form which when the user enters their email address, it's emailed to your secret email address: WP.com can totally do that. Note that this means processing sign-ups manually -- or having a system somewhere else which captures the signups and automatically sends a thank you note or whatever. WP can't handle processing or storing any kind of external user submission of data, they can merely pass it on to you via email messages. Worst case, you get an email from WP every time someone signs up, and each night you reply to signups with thank you notes, and store their emails someplace in your email program or mass email service.
Also, WP.com can't handle anything like the donors page you mention, not automatically, out of the box. But you have three options there: 1) curate such a list manually -- at the end of the day, it's all just HTML; 2) figure out if there's some way to get WP to let you embed an IFRAME or something (if it is possible, it might involve paying them for the privilege, since their business model is pay-for-more-play) and then have the content served from somewhere else; 3) have the donors page at a separate website. The first will be quite a bit of tedious work for you; the other two involve quite a bit of technical work on somebody's part. So maybe this should be put off as a "Version 2 Feature".
Thoughts:
1) You might want to create an email address specifically for this project. If it goes viral, it's going to wind up in a lot of people's address books, which means it will get harvested by spambots sooner rather than later. I think you might find it worth the trouble to set up. I know that Gmail (and I suspect that Outlook.com) can be configured to forward copies of all email to that account to your regular one; that way you know when you have incoming email, and so long as you're disciplined about only sending email from the project account, your personal email won't get exposed to random people signing up.
no subject
Wordpress.com allows free signups just like LJ does, and just like LJ you get your journal/blog name as part of the URL: ladysprite.wordpress.com.
As of this moment, btw, 1day4charity.wordpress.com and onedayforcharity.wordpress.com are both available. If either of those works for you, you might want to jump on it.
As I said above, WP will do 95% of what you want. It will happily be a website for you instead of a blog (here is a wordpress.com website of a colleague of mine; he retains a vestigial blog, but it can be turned off entirely if you want), so long as what you want doesn't go beyond 1) showing people webpages, 2) presenting people with a form through which they can contact you, and 3) some built in social media widgets.
You said you wanted mostly just a welcome page, FAQ, list of links and resources, and a place where people can sign up. A bunch of pages and a form which when the user enters their email address, it's emailed to your secret email address: WP.com can totally do that. Note that this means processing sign-ups manually -- or having a system somewhere else which captures the signups and automatically sends a thank you note or whatever. WP can't handle processing or storing any kind of external user submission of data, they can merely pass it on to you via email messages. Worst case, you get an email from WP every time someone signs up, and each night you reply to signups with thank you notes, and store their emails someplace in your email program or mass email service.
Also, WP.com can't handle anything like the donors page you mention, not automatically, out of the box. But you have three options there: 1) curate such a list manually -- at the end of the day, it's all just HTML; 2) figure out if there's some way to get WP to let you embed an IFRAME or something (if it is possible, it might involve paying them for the privilege, since their business model is pay-for-more-play) and then have the content served from somewhere else; 3) have the donors page at a separate website. The first will be quite a bit of tedious work for you; the other two involve quite a bit of technical work on somebody's part. So maybe this should be put off as a "Version 2 Feature".
Thoughts:
1) You might want to create an email address specifically for this project. If it goes viral, it's going to wind up in a lot of people's address books, which means it will get harvested by spambots sooner rather than later. I think you might find it worth the trouble to set up. I know that Gmail (and I suspect that Outlook.com) can be configured to forward copies of all email to that account to your regular one; that way you know when you have incoming email, and so long as you're disciplined about only sending email from the project account, your personal email won't get exposed to random people signing up.
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