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.
The Royal Marsden Cancer Campaign’s plan
Built in Drupal with a fun, wonky design, cute imagery and animated cupcakes. Nice use of a hand-drawn typeface and unmissable donation buttons. This is a mini-website devoted to a single initiative and dedicated to getting people to sign up or donate. Check out the rest of the site for more cute animations and simple sign-up forms.
At the outset of working with a charity I ask for their logo and often find it’s unsuitable for use on their website. It’s not uncommon to find the logo’s only half an inch high when printed and fuzzy round the edges. Some logos are emailed to me embedded in a Word document – not a proper image format. I once received a logo in the post. No, not on a CD, on paper. Presumably the sender thought I could scan it in and that would be good enough.
This request is mainly for smaller charities, many of which don’t have decent quality logos. Please get your logo fixed. Not it won’t just benefit your website but also your signage, your newsletter and any other kind of publicity. Unless you have a talented volunteer graphic designer handy, there will be a cost – but it’s worth it. >> Read more…
While you’re browsing websites, see the icon in the left of your Internet browser’s address bar? The tiny picture that represents a website? If you save that website in your Favourites you’ll see the same picture come up when you look at your list of bookmarked websites. That icon is a Favicon and your charity’s website should have one if you want your site to show out amongst all the other sites your visitors have bookmarked.
Here are 50 of the best charity website favicons:
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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…
The DesignMag website has an article listing 40+ inspirational non-profit website designs. My favourite has to be the Housing Works website for its big, bold home page images. Refresh the page to see the different photos, showing a random picture is one way to make your site look fresher. Notice how overlaying transparent images gives the site design an illusion of depth and substance.
The d’bug blog lists 10 inspiring and beautiful non-profit web designs. I especially liked the New York City Coalition Against Hunger website. Take a look at its Google Maps mashup which helps you find local soup kitchens. The blog is very relevant, commenting on the progress of legislation and current hunger and poverty issues. Interesting photo gallery too, using Flash to display postcards of the faces of hunger. Inspired yet?
On a contrary note, as Confessions of a Nonprofit Executive Director points out, web beauty is only skin-deep and whilst the 40 inspirational website all look great, they’ve not all been well coded (but read the comments to his article for some friendly disagreement).
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. >> Read more…
Baptcare is large nonprofit organisation providing care services in the state of Victoria, Australia. With over 760 staff based in several dozen locations, working in very different projects, good internal communication is vital. That’s why their Intranet is so important to them.
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. >> Read more…
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