Nonprofit web design

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.

>> Read more…

MANSEO is short for Mother of All Nonprofit Search Engines Optimized. It’s a search engine that only searches nonprofit technology websites. Why might that interest you? Well, type in keywords about web design (I just tested it by typing “CSS”, “Joomla”, “donations”, “CMS”) and all the results should all be specific to nonprofits’ use of these technologies.

That makes Manseo a great tool for when you want to find examples of what’s worked for other charities, what’s good practice and what’s being discussed by your peers about any tech topic. Manseo currently searches 259 websites but more are being added by a small team of volunteers (I’m adding some UK and Australian websites).

The Addiction Search Engine was designed to help people find reliable information on the web about addiction-related issues. It uses the free Google Custom Search tool and was set up by the Ana Liffey Drug Project, a not-for-profit organisation in Ireland. This case study explains how they did it. >> Read more…

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to get together and share skills and information about IT, web development and using technology.

I’m about to give a short presentation on how nonprofits can use Google Custom Search Engines (CSE) to quickly build their own free tools based on Google’s extremely popular search engine. I’ve written about Google CSE before but I’d like to share the five examples I’ll be giving at the conference. >> Read more…

Google is the best-known and most popular search engine and it searches billions of web pages to find matches for the keywords you type in. By and large it does a good job so why would your charity want to make its own search engine? Let’s take two common scenarios: >> Read more…