Building a website requires a range of knowledge and skills. You need an eye for design to make your website look professional and respectable, as well as the technical chops to turn that artistic vision into a usable theme. You need the experience or the sense of adventure to install the software ...

Editor’s note: All this month we’re publishing tech tips for nonprofits. Keep a look out for a new tip each day and let us know what you think in the comments. -Dan

Editor's note: All this month we're publishing tech tips for nonprofits. Keep a look out for a new tip each day and let us know what you think in the comments. -Dan

Editor's note: This article originally appeared at TechSoup.org, where you can find many other nonprofit technology resources. We’re grateful for the financial support our friends there provided for this article.

If I were to group all the questions I get into categories, one category would be far and away the most numerous. I'll call it the "options for people who can't afford software" category. As in, "Well, those databases for $300 or $20/month sound great, but we can't afford to pay anything—what can ...