Nonprofit web design

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…

The article Non Profit Website Design: Examples and Best Practices on the Smashing Magazine website is one of the best I’ve seen on how to build your charity’s website following best practice. The examples given are excellent. They don’t just consider the fundraising and campaigning aspects but also give tips on how to make your site journalist and volunteer friendly. Read all the comments too!

An article, published recently on the Web Designer Depot website, offers 8 tips to design a charity website. Each tip is illustrated with a screenshot of good practice in action on a nonprofit’s website. The tips are mainly related to fundraising and donations but scroll down the page for some great examples of good charity web design. There’s some good advice here and some inspiring design.

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…

Kathy Reid has written about how she designed a new website for the Bonnie Babes Foundation, a nonprofit organisation. It’s interesting because, as she points out, each of the software tools is completely and absolutely free. Read kathy’s article about finding an open source email and web solution.

Kathy’s blog is the only one I know where you can read about both web design and knitting!

Today, at the Making Links conference 2008 , we held a one-day event about web development where I gave a presentation about managing a non-profit organisation’s website. Here are the slides:

>> Read more…

Andrews Edwards from Huge Object spoke at Making Links 2008 about how nonprofits can work with web developers.

It was an interesting talk – Andrew has had plenty of experience working with nonprofits - and you can see the slideshow here:

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…