This site is static HTML, there’s no content management system (CMS) behind it and there was a large amount of written copy to insert, carefully markup with HTML and style using CSS. Dreamweaver templates were used to ensure the layout remained consistent across the many pages and sections.

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.

Both websites look good, but the New Zealand team won the compo. Read more on the Full Code Press competition website. Looking at their website design for Rainbow Youth there’s only one aspect that I think spoils the look of the site and that iss the charity’s logo, but I don’t suppose there was much the team could do about that! Everything else – the menu, the background images, the social networking section – looks great.

Considering the deadline was so tight it’s impressive to note all the little details – love the rainbow favicon and the appealing donation button – are in place.

Recently I visited Grampians disAbility Advocacy Association and learnt about how the GDAA website was designed for them in last year’s competition.

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!

The New Zealanders designed the disability advocacy website and the results look impressive, it’s a clean and modern design with good use of colour and its accessibility credentials are excellent. The team made the decision to build their own content management system (CMS) in PHP. Inevitably with any product designed so quickly there were going to be bugs, many of which were fixed after launch. A year and a half later the Association has a few ongoing problems with making content edits and with a member registration form that doesn’t register members.

The other team decided to use the Drupal CMS and I wonder whether that wasn’t a better long-term solution? Support is a big issue when you commission your website, who’s going to sort out any problems that arise? There are plenty of Drupal (and Joomla and WordPress) developers out there who can help you.

The interviews with the team leaders on the Full Code Press home page are well worth a read to get some idea of how decisions are made within a creative but pressed for time web development team.

Kathy’s blog is the only one I know where you can read about both web design and knitting!

On my last day as Baptcare’s website and Intranet editor, my final task was to create a landing page for their charity golf event.

Here’s the result, designed and coded with valid HTML within only a few hours. The design has simple, attractive typography using Baptcare’s corporate colours. However, this landing page looks nothing like the usual template used elsewhere on the Baptcare website, it’s a complete one-off. Baptcare’s usual template is too restrictive, not eye-catching enough to use as a landing page.

What is a landing page? Usually it’s defined as a page that visitors will arrive at directly via an advert or link on another website. A landing pages might not be linked to from an organisation’s own site at all, only from banners or adverts on external sites or from ads on postcards or other printed media.

The golf event page provides links to only two locations: a rollover button and the words “Register Now” in large text, both link to the same PDF brochure; and in the footer is a link to the Baptcare home page. No distractions, just information.

So that was the landing page set up, but how did I make sure that it actually gets landed on? Using our Google Grant I set up multiple free adverts, like the one below, that link to the landing page.

Plus, on the home page of the Baptcare website is a big button that links to the landing page. If anyone reads about the golf day in our newsletter, then visits the website to find out more, they can’t miss it!

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.

That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare‘s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas…

Doubled your stats you say?

Below are Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July 2008:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August 2008 (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, we might have a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%. What’s the reason for this? Maybe it’s…

Google’s helpful volunteers

A volunteer on Google’s staff regularly goes in to our AdWords account, sets up new adverts and tweaks them to make sure they’re performing well. That’s a great free service, really helpful and their edits can be effective. But it can also be disconcerting, especially when they rename your campaigns, capitalise every word and add exclamation marks to ads that you’ve honed to your own idea of perfection. I know I’m overly pedantic, I fuss about the grammar and punctuation and try to stick to Baptcare’s corporate identity, but Google’s volunteer must know more about what makes a good ad than I do, because their adverts are usually more effective.

Maybe Google’s staff choose to volunteer to support the nonprofits that most interest them, I don’t know quite how the system works but so far no volunteer has helped tweak the Greek Care ads. This may have been one factor in Baptcare’s online advertising success and Greek Care’s lack of it.

Start off by creating lots of ads

For Greek Care I started off with just a few ads and was disappointed by the poor response. Whereas, for Baptcare I quickly set up dozens of ads: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the good ones.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so I ditched the others.

Then keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare. 

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise.

Greek Care is a small, niche website dealing with Greek culture and aged care, whereas Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work.

It was so easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With the Greek Care website there was less to work with and I will have to try to be more creative.

Link ads to specific pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. The Baptcare website has had big increases in visits to our fostering, residential aged care and vacancies sections because our ads link to their landing pages.

Keep at it

If your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep tweaking, keep experimenting. Having got one online ad campaign off to a successful start, I’m going to go back to the Greek Care campaign and try again. If I’m successful I’ll crow about it in my next post; if not, I might go a bit quiet on the subject for a while!