Leonie Dunbar gave a presentation about geographical domain names at the Making Links 2008 conference. Apparently they are a world first and I think it’s an interesting, potentially very valuable idea. Why?

• You can guess the website URL for your local community website; or look them up in the directory;
• It gives authority, and almost certainly better search engine placement, to these community organisations.
• auCD have strict rules about which community organisation is issued a domain.
• Their ”Community Website in a Box” CMS enables an organisation, if they choose to use it, to manage their web content.

But:

• There can be only one georaphical domain name per community. What if more than one organisation registers an interest? How would disputes be managed?
• I just tested a dozen websites and none validated with fewer than 10 html errors. Isn’t Community Website in a Box supposed to be accessible?

Good to see that the web team at InfoXchange has already developed a website with a geographical domain, for the Collingwood Wired Community at www.collingwood.vic.au/. And it’s one of the best-looking sites so far!

Like most charities, we’ve published vacancies on our website and in print. Visitors would see an ad that we’d placed in the jobs section of the local newspaper and then visit the website to download more information - but very few visitors seemed to discover the ads just by searching Google.

Unfortunately, Google isn’t ever completely up-to-date, it updates its indexes every few weeks, so a job vacancy might come and go on the website without Google noticing it (by the way, setting up an XML SiteMap can help Google spot your updates quicker).

However, if you create an ad using Google AdWords it appears immediately to people searching Google for relevant keywords. Plus, if you have a Google Grant then your ad tends to get prioritised above those of for-profit websites. Our charity’s job-related ads have consistently been positioned above those of well known jobfinder websites and usually our ads are in the #1 position for keywords such as “aged care nursing” and “residential care nursing”.

I create an ad on Google for each of our vacancies, with the ad’s URL pointed to the relevant page on our website. I’ve also created a few ads that point to more generic pages on our website on topics such as “Why work for Baptcare” and “Aged care nursing”. These ad campaigns are only displayed to people in Victoria and Tasmania, the areas that we work in.

What’s the happy result?

According to the HR department, we’ve had a big increase in the number of people applying for jobs, and the quality of the applications has not dropped. So our Google Grant has produced a measurable, very practical benefit.

An Intranet is like a website except that it’s only available to people working within the organisation. It’s used to share information internally rather than to publicly promote the organisation’s services. Recently I redesigned Baptcare’s Intranet home page.

The Intranet after its redesign

This is what the Intranet’s home page looks like since I redesigned it:

And what the Intranet looked like before its redesign:

Bear in mind this is an Intranet, not a public website. It will only be used by staff, who see it every day and mostly use it to find information, forms and procedures. It needed a redesign but what were the main problems and how were they solved?

Wasted space

A huge photo took up most of the home page, wasting space that could be used to provide useful information.

 The design was simplified. The huge photo was removed and replaced with a much smaller image that actually had some relevance to our recent activities.

Legibility

The “quick links” section at the bottom-right was nearly illegible, with small text and not enough contrast between text and background colours. The menu buttons on the left-hand side were also difficult to read because a patterned background had been used.

Menu buttons were made clearer by removing the patterned background and separating them from other images. Actually the buttons are a single image, with an accessible html image map that enables visitors to click through to other pages.

The redesigned home page has a larger font-size. Darkgrey text on a white background makes it much easier to read than before.

Out of date

The home page was very static with little in the way of new content. Therefore staff might have assumed that nothing new was being published on the Intranet.

The home page now automatically displays the most recent news items, events, vacancies and announcements as they are published in various sections of the Intranet. Automation has cut down on the amount of duplication involved.We also added an email link at the bottom of the page so that staff can suggest changes and send the editor new content for the site.

Difficult to find information

A real problem on an Intranet. Links were difficult to read, there were links to empty pages and the search facility was broken.

I deleted all the redundant pages from the Intranet. The problem with the search facility was referred to Baptcare’s IT dept and to the web design company.

The technology

The Baptcare Intranet is based on IBM Websphere, a complex document management system. Redesigning the home page involved making changes to CSS and HTML and to various other files used in the Websphere templates. There were limitations. I couldn’t make changes to the banner and menu at the top of the page because they have to stay the same as on other pages of the site.

There are alternative software and applications you can use to run an Intranet for your nonprofit organisation:

• Backpack is very easy to use and you can try it for free but gets expensive if you have a lot of staff that need access;
• Sharepoint has to be set up on your own server but is very flexible, works well with other Microsoft software and you can search inside the content of your organisation’s documents.
• WordPress can be set up to work as an Intranet. For example the WordPress Membership plugin will enable you to make some content available only to logged in users. This option would particularly suit organisations that already use WordPress for their public website. I’d be happy to provide a quote for setting up an Intranet using WordPress.

The results

Staff were given no warning that the Intranet home page was going through a redesign but they couldn’t help but notice the next time they opened their browser. All the comments so far have been complimentary and staff have told me they straight away went to see what was new and discovered content they’d not been aware of before. The new home page has succeeded in making the Intranet more accessible.

Jason would be interested in helping you improve your Intranet – contact at jason@kingjason.co.uk.

The website was developed using the free and open source WordPress content management system to make it easy for non-web designers to publish and edit pages.

I’d like to tell you how that project was tackled, and how various plugins were installed to add extra functionality to the basic CMS.

The site publishes over 80 articles, specially written for health and social care professionals to help them understand Greek culture and attitudes and provide better care services. Topics are wide-ranging: providing palliative care; death and mourning; where to find recipes that clients will enjoy; making culturally appropriate assessments; favourite Greek games; and how to make a cup of Greek coffee. The site has audio clips to help professionals pronounce basic Greek phrases such as “would you like a blanket?” and “where do you have pain?”. There’s also a directory of Greek-speaking services in Victoria, Australia.

Why was WordPress chosen?

The content editors needed a simple tool to input a lot of articles and WordPress is easy to use, learn and teach. I’m also familiar with developing WordPress sites. Time and again I’ve heard from users and developers that they consider it to be the best match for small nonprofit organisations’ web publishing needs.

Installing WordPress

WordPress was installed almost immediately, so that there would be no delay in content editors publishing articles and arranging them in sections. They could input text while I was still designing the look and functionality of the site. The installation was quick and easy and it helped that the web host we’re using – WebCity – has particularly fast FTP transfers and a feature-rich hosting control panel. 

Creating a WordPress theme

A graphic artist designed the banner at the top of the page and based on that design, I created a WordPress theme. I coded it from scratch rather than use a free, pre-made WordPress theme: those themes are great for blogs but we were going to use WordPress mainly as a CMS, not a blog. The only code I copied and pasted over was for the “loop”: the code that displays the content of each page.

The site was designed to be accessible, with standards-compliant HTML and CSS code.

Some pages – the home page, searchable directory, list of saints’ days – needed different or more complex functionality than the other pages – so they were created using page templates, a feature of WordPress I find particularly useful.

Keeping the website secret

We didn’t want anyone else to see the website while it was being designed so I installed Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin which prevents viewing of the site unless you have a username and password.

Improving on WordPress’s rubbish search facility

I had to install the Search Everything plugin because by default WordPress doesn’t search pages, only posts. Then we tested the search facility and found that it brought up the right pages but wasn’t listing them in order of relevance. The Search Reloaded plugin fixed that problem.

A handy Site Map

Fronditha were concerned that the site had a complex structure and users might not find what they wanted. So once we’d fixed the search facility, we published a site map. That task was made easy by a plugin called Dagon Design SiteMap Generator.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs help you navigate around a website but there’s no in-built feature in WordPress. One reason I like using WordPress is the variety of plugins that developers have built to add extra functionality and compensate for what’s missing. And sure enough, there’s a great plugin for breadcrumbs called Breadcrumbs NavXT.

Database interactions

We wanted to publish a searchable directory of Greek-speaking services in Victoria. We also wanted to have a list of Greek Saints’ days that was searchable, with upcoming dates listed on the home page. This isn’t something that WordPress was really built to do.

Two new custom-built MySQL databases had to be created. The content was uploaded to them from simple comma-separated text files which had been exported from an Access database and Excel spreadsheet. Then, within the WordPress theme, I created new page templates, using (relatively) simple PHP code to connect to the databases and display the appropriate data.

This could have been tackled in other, perhaps better ways. If, for example, we’d used Drupal instead of WordPress we could have stored page content, blog, directory entries and saints’ days in a single database and edited them through a common interface. But Drupal is substantially more complex and time-consuming to develop for than WordPress.

Audio

I chose a very simple method of enabling users to play the audio clips of Greek phrases, inserting two short lines of Javascript code to invoke the Yahoo Media Player. The media player automatically inserts a play button for every MP3 file linked to on that page. Not sure I’m 100% happy with the results but if I decide to do it differently, at least there isn’t much code to change.

Nearly there…

Google Analytics code was inserted into the theme’s footer so that Fronditha and myself can access those valuable website usage statistics.

Launch!

It’s taken many months to put together and involved the hard work of content writers and editors, a graphic designer, data inputters, the project manager and myself. I’m happy see the Greek Care website go live at last becuase it should be a really useful and practical resource for care providers.

CiviCRM helps you manage your relationships with donors and supporters, sign up people to attend your events, run your memberships and handle your email newsletters and other communications. Lots of nonprofits are using it and I can see why, it has a lot of very useful features.

Of course, free doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no cost. Installing and using applications like this can take a substantial chunk of staff time. You might need to pay someone or find a tech volunter to install CiviCRM for you. I recently agreed to volunteer for a UK charity to help them install Drupal and CiviCRM. But we hit problems because the correct version of PHP wasn’t installed on their host’s server; then there was an FTP permissions problem! But the good news is that once we resolve all these issues and get it installed, it should be easy to use and give the charity some really useful tools. I’m looking forward to seeing CiviCRM in action.

By the way, interesting to see that both favour using WordPress as a blogging tool. WordPress seems to be such a good fit for small nonprofits and it can publish your whole website, pages and all, not just your blog. Also, surprising to see that most subscribers to Philanthropy Australia’s blog are doing so by email rather than RSS – so if you have an RSS feed, make sure you burn it through a service like Feedburner so it can be subscribed to by email.

Here’s the slideshow:

| View | Upload your own

On 18 August 2007, a team of volunteer web professionals from Australia and a team from New Zealand competed to build a complete website for a non-profit organisation in just 24 hours.

The New Zealanders won the competition but the real winners were The Ripple Effect and Our Voice, the two charities that now have brand new, fully-functional websites. Well done to all involved because this event was a great idea and something that could be easily replicated by teams of volunteers in other countries.

You can read all about the event at www.fullcodepress.com and even watch videos of the work in progress and interviews with the participants. It’s an excellent opportunity to see how a website can evolve: from the original brief, through discussion and conception, to delivery of the final product. With added moments of panic when you’re on a tight deadline!