Nonprofit web design

I was commissioned to complete an already half-built website for ARISE. They’re a nonprofit organisation in the US that sells training materials and courses for at-risk youth. The visual design was mostly in place but the shopping cart wasn’t working properly and there were a lot of formatting, navigation and other problems. E-commerce is something that only a minority of charities’ websites are set up to do so this has been an interesting project to work on.

The site uses WordPress as its content management system (CMS) plus a WordPress plugin called Shopp to handle the store’s catalogue and payments. To begin with I found Shopp difficult to get to grips with: some of its problems were due to using an older version but upgrading didn’t go smoothly; and we had a problem with the payment page getting stuck in a loop. All that’s now been sorted out and the latest version of Shopp seems a lot less buggy. It’s actually not a bad product, with about the right mix of features and simplicity, and well worth considering if you want to sell merchandise and your site uses WordPress.

Getting drop-down navigation menus to work across browsers can be troublesome, but it now works ok thanks to the Multi-level Navigation plugin which turns WordPress’s very basic menu into a drop-down, slide-out version. That was a necessity for the ARISE website because it has a lot of content to navigate.

One of the unfinished features was the slideshow on the home page. I used a jCarousel horizontal carousel to enable lots of content to fit into a smaller area on-screen; clicking on next/previous buttons lets you cycle through the items. I love these carousels, they can be a great way to display news or tell a story.

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