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.
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.
» Visit the Next Door website
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.
My latest website is unusual, in that it was built for a business rather than a nonprofit organisation. The Change Management Group is a business consultancy that’s based in the UK but has an international reach.
The Change Management Group wanted to use WordPress MU (Multi User) which is a version of WordPress that can host multiple blogs. WordPress MU can even be used to run communities of thousands of blogs. 99% of its code is identical to WordPress but that extra 1% enables you to do so much more. Although the site doesn’t currently host multiple separate blogs, the functionality is there for when they require it.
The Change Management Group also wanted me to install WP-Remix which is a premium (meaning you pay $75) theme for WordPress. It offers a way to get around the usual layout restrictions in WordPress by offering you a choice of templates for each page you edit. You want an extra column on your home page? You want a list of staff with thumbnail photos next to their details? Just choose the appropriate template. WP-Remix can be a bit buggy at times but the flexibility it offers makes it worth considering.
There are definite advantages to using a premium theme to build a website: the client can visualise what they’re going to get; premium themes are usually better coded than free themes; and they cut down on the design and coding work required if the site was to be entirely custom built; so you can jump straight into customisation.
Visit The Change Management Group’s new website.
WordPress is a great product, which is why it’s installed behind most of the websites I design, but it doesn’t do everything out of the box. Fortunately there is a way to change and add new functionality to the basic CMS, and that’s by installing plugins. So which plugins do I install most often? Continue Reading »
I’m at Software Freedom Day, Melbourne today. It’s a fairly small event which attracts some interesting people (yes, geeks) to listen to talks and discuss open source software.
Kathy Reid gave a talk on beginner’s WordPress. She’s an assured presenter and did a great job of guiding us through its basic features and how they can be used to edit the content of a website. In her advanced session later in the day I picked up some practical tips on improving the security in WordPress – WordPress balances out the need for security with the need to keep the product simple and there are ways to improve this. By the way, Kathy’s also a top knitter.
Simon Hobbs from Em Space is now presenting about Drupal, with a very visual, diagrammatic presentation explaining how this CMS works. I’m intending to use Drupal more in future so this demonstration is a useful primer. Em Space have done some great websites for nonprofit clients.
I’m hunting round trying to find someone who can support an open source product called CiviCRM because a nonprofit organisation I visited recently are considering using it. It’s a client relationship application that can sit behind Drupal on an organisation’s website. Anyone out there know someone who supports CiviCRM?
Charities are more likely to have poor website security than organisations in other sectors, according to the Web Application Annual Security Report 2009 which was published this week. What kind of insecurities did the report find?
Not having account lockout mechanisms in place, which stop hackers from repeatedly guessing passwords. That’s why on my websites (which use the WordPress CMS) I now use a plugin called Login Lockdown which locks people out of the login form if they keep entering incorrect passwords.
Charities often choose insecure passwords, which increases the chances of unauthorised access to accounts. Too many charities use their organisation’s own name or location as their password, sometimes with a letter replaced by a number. Anything that can be guessed is really poor security. LASA’s Knowledgebase has advice on choosing secure passwords. Continue Reading »
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