Nonprofit web design

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to discuss ICT.

Yesterday’s all-day workshop, by Laurel Papworth, was about social networking. Laurel’s a great trainer and it was an interesting session that covered so much I can’t do justice to it here.

What’s social networking? Well, it covers a wide variety of online tools and websites that enable people to make friends, find people with similar interests, socialise, form discussion groups and share video, photos and information. For example, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and even games such as World of Warcraft are all social networking tools. >> Read more…

Online discussion forums enable your website’s visitors to have a conversation. Your website could host a busy virtual community; and if you are a health organisation you could even use forums to provide an Internet-based support network. In 2007 the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust won an eWellbeing award for its use of online forums in building social networks. This case study explains what was learnt along the way. >> Read more…

When I ask charities about their backup routines, they all know they should backup their documents, their emails and so on but few mention their website. That’s an unfortunate oversight because it’s fairly easy to lose control of your own website and it’s good practice to have backups and documentation to hand – just in case. >> Read more…

A content management system (CMS) is a tool that can be installed within your website to make it easy for you to edit your own pages, text and graphics from any Internet-connected computer. A CMS means never having to pay your web designer to do simple updates. I’d like to explain why I think a CMS called WordPress is especially suitable for nonprofits. >> Read more…