My latest commission — RSA Comment — is a website where you can read opinion pieces, watch topical videos, comment on them and even submit your own writing. The site carefully follows the corporate branding of the RSA. It uses WordPress as its underlying CMS, has a complex home page layout and multiple columns on all pages. This was one of my most complex website designs so far – and a pleasure to work on.
Many charities would benefit from the occasional assistance of a volunteer with IT skills. That’s why IT4Communities was set up to match charities with IT professionals wanting to volunteer their skills. I’m now working part-time for IT4Communities in their London office.
What kind of help can nonprofits get from a volunteer? Well, here are just a few examples of volunteering opportunities listed on the website recently:
IT fixer for prison charity: This charity based at Dartmoor prison, Princetown, Devon, helps maintain family contact between prisoners and their children. Imprisoned parents read a bedtime story which is either recorded digitally or filmed. They’re looking for a local volunteer who would be available to come in and rectify problems when they occur and also to train staff to solve simple IT problems and do simple maintenance tasks. Read more »
If you’re planning to have a new website, or improve your existing site, you should put your requirements down on paper in the form of a project brief.
I see a lot of briefs for new websites and redesigns. Some are well thought out, detailed and show a good understanding of how the web can be used to practical advantage by nonprofit organisations. Unfortunately many are not written like this. It’s not uncommon for me to read a brief and afterwards have no idea what the charity actually wants done; or in extreme cases to be given just one or two sentences explaining what they want.
There are good reasons for this: charities don’t always understand the Internet; they underestimate how much staff time they’ll need to devote in the planning stage; they don’t realise how much information a web designer will need; they don’t know the jargon; and sometimes they want someone else to do all the thinking for them.
Just published – on the Boagworld website – is a great guide to putting together a successful website project brief: 10 things never to leave out of a web design brief. I hope it’s helpful.
I started a new job today, working three days a week for IT4Communities. This organisation matches IT volunteers with nonprofit organisations in need of help with websites, databases and other IT systems. I’m working at their office near Barbican, London.
My project – for six months – is to look after their mentoring scheme. This project matches qualified but less experienced volunteers to organisations, and it also matches them both with a mentor: a more experienced person who can provide guidance and help ensure the task is resolved.
As well as this new job, I’m still doing freelance web development.
Adam is a besom broom maker, spoon carver and woodturner. I recently overhauled his website so he can sell his carved spoons through an online shop.
The website uses a shopping cart called WP E-Commerce which enables customers to buy online and for Adam to receive payment via PayPal. This plugin is free although for about £20 you can uprade to a Gold Cart version with more capabilities. This is a small price to pay for a shopping cart which has, on the whole, been easy to install. Read more »
Next Door is a nonprofit organisation in the US that provides intervention and prevention services for domestic violence. They wanted a new website and wanted it quickly. This is what we built together using WordPress.
We decided, to keep costs down and to enable the site to be built quickly, to use a premium pre-built WordPress theme called Allure by StudioPress. The Allure theme is well designed and comes with a handy slideshow on the home page to display featured content, and room for adverts in the right column. It cost US$60.
Next Door then asked a graphic artist to redesign the look of the theme, changing the images and colour scheme; after which I changed the theme’s code to match the new style.
Once WordPress had been installed and configured and the theme implemented. I gave the organisation advice, helping them to understand how to use WordPress to enter their own content, pages and news.
Making Links is a nonprofit technology conference that took place in Melbourne in mid November 2009. They held an additional Intensive Web Developers Day and I ran one of the sessions, on the topic of getting your nonprofit’s website noticed. Here’s the presentation to accompany the workshop.
In recent weeks I’ve had to rescue a few websites: a WordPress site that had been hacked, a static HTML site that had simply vanished, and a nonprofit e-commerce website with a database that had crashed under the weight of its own data.
Websites getting hacked is a real concern and it can happen to any organisation. That’s why this post, on the Wild Apricot blog, is such a useful read: When Nonprofit Websites Go Bad.
You should heed the advice on upgrading your software: if you use WordPress then upgrade when new versions come out; and whenever you login check if you need to upgrade plugins.
I’d add another suggestion: get a free Google Webmaster Tools account. If your sites does get hacked you can get an early warning by email, and after you’ve repaired the site you can request Google reinstate your website in its results. Plus you’ll get a shedload of useful tools for checking how well your site performs in search engines.
Bad Behavior has blocked 847 access attempts in the last 7 days.