Nonprofit web design

The draft programme for the Making Links conference in Melbourne, November 2009  is now available from their website at www.makinglinks.org.au.

Featuring its usual successful mix of practical workshops, panels, oral presentations and networking opportunities, this year’s conference addresses the twin challenges of the global economic crisis and environmental sustainability.

The ICT infrastructure stream includes sessions on installing services remotely, free and cheap tools, rolling out IT infrastructure to inexperienced staff and clients, cloud computing, IT security, saving money by working collaboratively and more.

The Community Building and Social Media stream features a wide range of case-studies on how organisations are using web 2.0 to engage, connect and empower their clients and communities.

Practical and interactive workshops provide great opportunities to learn new skills such as pod-casting, writing for the web, and managing e-newsletters, or to focus on how we can work together to minimise the risks of climate change.

I’m particularly looking forward to Gian Wild’s web accessibility workshop. Web accessibliity is not something that most nonprofits have got to grips with and Gian’s got good form: she worked on the very first Australian accessible web site and was the accessibility consultant for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games.

It’s important, when designing a website and writing content, that you do so in a way that’s meaningful and useful to your client group.

But what if your site’s visitors are split into groups with distinct and very different needs and different intellectual abilities? How does a single website serve both people with a learning disability, and health and social care professionals? Let’s see how the Mencap website – a design I particularly admire – successfully tackles this.

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The website of the World Glaucoma Association was nominated by Web Pages that Suck as one of the worst in the world. Glaucoma is a visual impairment and websites are supposed (and in many countries legally obliged) to be designed to meet the needs of disabled people.

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Today I visited Grampians disAbility Advocacy Association who won their website in a competition. I’m driving round Victoria surveying small nonprofits’ IT needs and capabilities; I always ask who designed their website but don’t tend to get so unusual an answer.

The competition was called Full Code Press and pitted an Australian team against a New Zealand team. Team members were thrown together to design a nonprofit’s website and had only a day to plan and design it. Someone involved described it as a geek Olympics! >> Read more…

Over the past year I’ve struggled to get the Baptcare website to validate when tested against http://validator.w3.org/. My problem was the complexity of the IBM WebCM content management system that powers the Baptcare website and figuring out how to understand and edit its presentation templates, menus and navigation files.

But today I finally got the www.baptcare.org.au website to validate – and it’s only taken a whole year, hurrah!

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Is your charity’s website well-designed and does it perform as well as it should? Here are eight simple tests to help you find out. None of these tests require you to understand web design but you may need to go back to your web designer to resolve any problems that you find. First, let’s check your site’s code for errors.

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Blind people can use software to read aloud the content from websites but only if those websites are designed properly. A federal court judge in California has issued two landmark decisions against the Target Corporation, a retail company, because their website was inaccessible to blind people. >> Read more…

This free booklet and CD is an invaluable, practical and simple introduction to web accessibility. Accessibility – making your website available to all - is good practice and a legal requirement in many countries. This publication tells you what UK law says, but its advice is equally relevant wherever you are in the world. I’d recommend that charities get one copy of this pack for themselves and give another to their web designer. >> Read more…