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.
23 Aug 2009
30 May 2009
Even running a fairly small website involves a lot of management. Staff members and trustees need to plan the website, communicate back and forth with the web designer, collaborate to create content, set tasks and deadlines and allocate work to volunteers. At every stage documentation can end up duplicated, spread across several peoples’ computers and is never to hand when you need it.
To make managing your website easier, consider using an online project management tool like Basecamp. What can it do? >> Read more…
On the UK Circuit Riders website Michael McAndrew has started a list of small and medium-sized UK non-profits using Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. Worth a look if you’re undecided about which CMS to choose and want to see examples of how other nonprofit organisations have used theirs. And if you need advice on choosing a CMS read the article 10 criteria for selecting a CMS on the Boagworld website and the articles in the Managing Content section of the LASA Knowledgebase.
14 Apr 2009
Email newsletters, how hard can they be? Well, I just set up an HTML e-newsletter campaign and it’s been a sometimes frustrating experience, but worthwhile because email is a great marketing tool. A great online application called MailChimp has made it much simpler. >> Read more…
14 Nov 2008
Kathy Reid gave a great presentation at Making Links 2008 on the topic of free software for nonprofit organisations. Kathy has written about her experience of the Intensive Web Day. Kathy shared her expriences and opinions on various free tools such as Joomla, Moodle and WordPress and then led a discussion on which CMS to use. It was a great session, lots to learn. Here is her slideshow:
12 Nov 2008
The Making Links conference has begun. We’re at Melbourne University this year, where I just gave a presentation on using WordPress to power your nonprofit’s website. Here’s the slideshow:
What else is happening at the Making Links 2008 conference? Read people’s comments here and look at photos here.
28 Oct 2008
The Baptcare website publishes an RSS feed so that our supporters can subscribe to hear about our news and events. Recently I added another feed, for our vacancies.
I just checked the stats and discovered that Baptcare’s jobs feed has five times as many subscribers as the news feed. What’s more, plenty of people are clicking the link to visit the page on our website where they can download the position description. Methinks a job feed could be a really useful recruitment tool. >> Read more…
16 Oct 2008
In the bad old days - just a few years ago - spam was frequent and filthy. Nowadays very little junk arrives in my email inbox and it’s often unnervingly polite.
This week I’ve been offered pet nail trimmers, tips on growing my lawn, a $7500 line of credit, a government grant and airline tickets. There was only one slightly naughty ad and it euphemistically suggested I needed a bigger canoe. That’s a far cry from the language of spam a few years ago.
The bad news is that appalling, horrible, offensive, disgusting spam is still prevalent online: it may not be in your inbox but if you’re not careful it’ll appear on your website. And you don’t want that, especially when your charity has a respectable image to uphold and clients and supporters who might be offended.
Comment spam on blogs is one of the biggest problem areas. >> Read more…
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