Nonprofit web design

Let’s say you run a small nonprofit organisation. You want a website and that’s going to cost you two main things: staff time and money; but what if you have no budget? Absolutely zero. Provided you have the staff time to contribute, you have options: >> Read more…

The Slideshare website has published the results of its presentation competition. The winner was an educational slideshow about worldwide water usage. Although not created by a nonprofit, it’s excellent inspiration for charities that want to put across a campaigning message. Notice how simple it is, with carefully chosen fonts and colour scheme and images from a photo library. You could do this!

Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share them with the world. You can then easily insert those presentations into your own website (just like I’ve done here) by pasting code that Slideshare provides into your web pages.

>> Read more…

A Content Management System (CMS) can be installed behind your website, enabling you to quickly and easily create new pages and post news items onto your site. Many CMS are free and open source which makes them ideal for nonprofit use.

If your web designer suggests building your new website using Drupal or Joomla or MODx or any one of the hundred other open source CMS out there, how do you know if you’ll like it or even get the hang of it? Well, you could visit the OpenSourceCMS website and try it out. This excellent website gives you full admin rights to some of the best CMS so you can give them a try and play around with all their features.

Did you know that Melbourne has the biggest Greek population outside of Greece? That’s why I was commissioned to design the Greek Care website by Fronditha, a charity in Victoria, Australia. The website, which launched this week, provides information and advice about the care of elderly Greek people.

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. >> Read more…

Andrew Perry demonstrated a free and open-source product called CiviCRM at the Connecting Up conference. It’s a customer relationshop management tool that you can install on your own webspace; and if you use either Drupal or Joomla to run your website, then CiviCRM can integrate with it.

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. >> Read more…

Do you take online donations on your charity’s website? If not, why not?

PayPal is an online payments tool. It’s extremely popular with 160,000,000+ people signed up, and if you’re an eBay user you’ve probably used it. Did you know that you can use PayPal to put a donate button on your nonprofit organisation’s website? Transactions are safe and secure and all details are kept for your records. Donors can pay by PayPal or credit card. Of course PayPal takes a small percentage of each amount, they’re a business after all!

It’s a really simple solution but…  >> Read more…

A charity recently contacted me because through no fault of their own their website had vanished. Their calls and emails to the hosting company were simply being ignored and many weeks later they had received no explanation or resumption of service. These are the decisions we had to make quickly to get their website up-and-running again… >> Read more…

Do you run a church website? If so, take a look at this checklist of features that every church website needs. It’s good advice from the ChurchBrilliant blog.

What I found interesting was the emphasis on using websites to involve people in real world events. Apparently, surveys on many church websites have shown that as many as 60% of visitors are looking for information about events they can join in with. As the blog notes, that makes a church website an important advertising tool.