I see a lot of briefs for new websites and redesigns. Some are well thought out, detailed and show a good understanding of how the web can be used to practical advantage by nonprofit organisations. Unfortunately many are not written like this. It’s not uncommon for me to read a brief and afterwards have no idea what the charity actually wants done; or in extreme cases to be given just one or two sentences explaining what they want.

There are good reasons for this: charities don’t always understand the Internet; they underestimate how much staff time they’ll need to devote in the planning stage; they don’t realise how much information a web designer will need; they don’t know the jargon; and sometimes they want someone else to do all the thinking for them.

Just published – on the Boagworld website – is a great guide to putting together a successful website project brief: 10 things never to leave out of a web design brief. I hope it’s helpful.

To make managing your website easier, consider using an online project management tool like Basecamp. What can it do?

Share documents with colleagues and your web designer

Basecamp has a Files section where you can upload all the documents relevant to your website.  These might include:

• Draft and final project briefs;
• Invitations to tender;
• Quotes from web designers;
• Contracts;
• Draft images of the visual design;
• JPEGS and GIFS: your logo, photos, backgrounds etc;
• The text content for various pages on the site.

What if you have a lot of documents? Won’t that get confusing? Not really, because you can create your own categories (content, images, invoices etc) and choose to see only relevant files.

Leave  comments and give opinions

You could upload your new logo design and send your colleages a message to ask them to look at it and leave their comments.

Make To-Do lists

These I use a lot, sometimes hundreds of items for a single project. Again, they can be categorised, and ticked off one by one as they are completed. You can associate your to-do lists with milestones which you set to help you keep the work on track and on time. You can make to-do lists for yourself or allocate work to someone else.

Collaborate with your colleagues to write content

Basecamp offers whiteboards which you can use to collaboratively write a web page, a contract or a project brief. Create a new whiteboard for your home page and start typing in text; then send a message to your colleagues inviting them to make amendments. Every time someone makes changes to the whiteboard it’s saved as a new version: you can then compare the various versions until you’re happy with the result.

Use email or a project management tool, or both?

The email correspondence that takes place between various parties can build up fast and it becomes difficult to find the attachment you need! But I’ve found the solution is to almost completely stop using email and correspond by leaving messages in Basecamp instead.

When you upload a file or leave a message in Basecamp you can choose to send an email notification to as many other users as you want. Plus, you can subscribe by RSS feed to get notifications of new comments, files and messages as they happen.

Other project management tools

Microsoft Project is the best-know project management software and you might already have it on your computer. I don’t like it one bit, I find it confusing because there are too many features – it’s not simple enough for me or for my clients!

There’s an excellent article on the TechSoup website called Six Views of Project-Management Software.

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!

The New Zealanders designed the disability advocacy website and the results look impressive, it’s a clean and modern design with good use of colour and its accessibility credentials are excellent. The team made the decision to build their own content management system (CMS) in PHP. Inevitably with any product designed so quickly there were going to be bugs, many of which were fixed after launch. A year and a half later the Association has a few ongoing problems with making content edits and with a member registration form that doesn’t register members.

The other team decided to use the Drupal CMS and I wonder whether that wasn’t a better long-term solution? Support is a big issue when you commission your website, who’s going to sort out any problems that arise? There are plenty of Drupal (and Joomla and WordPress) developers out there who can help you.

The interviews with the team leaders on the Full Code Press home page are well worth a read to get some idea of how decisions are made within a creative but pressed for time web development team.

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

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

• Learn web design – takes ages to learn properly, not realistic for most busy charity employees;
• Look for funding – takes time and a measure of luck and patience;
• Find a volunteer – a sensible option to consider, maybe try IT4C;
• Use a free online tool to create a simple website – what are the benefits and drawbacks?

From the early days of the world wide web there have been online tools to help you create your own website. Remember when every other website was created with Geocities (not a recommendation) or a similar tool? Most of these services were frankly awful, both in terms of visual appeal and accessibility.

The free Google Sites might be better, enabling you to put together a cross between a website and a wiki. It won’t create the most impressive or original website – the templating seems very basic – but it will enable you to start up a basic website and create pages and upload documents, calendars, images etc.

One useful feature is that you can use various Google tools to collaborate with other people to build up your site content – in some ways Google Sites could be better suited to building a quick and uncomplicated Intranet than a website.

Want to find out more?

• The CodeKindness blog has a post about how PeaceGames, a small US nonprofit, used Google Sites.
• Why Google Sites isn’t a website builder.
• Take a quick look at what the Wild Apricot website had to say about Google Sites.
• Why Judi Sohn is disappointed with it.
• The example of a nonprofit that gave itself a Google Makeover.

My own opinion? I might recommend it to a cash-strapped nonprofit that couldn’t afford to hire a web designer or can’t find a volunteer, that wants a simple Intranet to share docs with their volunteers and trustees. I’m not sure whether it projects a professional enough image as a public-facing website.

Is anyone out there using Google Sites – how useful have you found it?

An Intranet is like a website except that it’s only available to people working within the organisation. It’s used to share information internally rather than to publicly promote the organisation’s services. Recently I redesigned Baptcare’s Intranet home page.

The Intranet after its redesign

This is what the Intranet’s home page looks like since I redesigned it:

And what the Intranet looked like before its redesign:

Bear in mind this is an Intranet, not a public website. It will only be used by staff, who see it every day and mostly use it to find information, forms and procedures. It needed a redesign but what were the main problems and how were they solved?

Wasted space

A huge photo took up most of the home page, wasting space that could be used to provide useful information.

The design was simplified. The huge photo was removed and replaced with a much smaller image that actually had some relevance to our recent activities.

Legibility

The “quick links” section at the bottom-right was nearly illegible, with small text and not enough contrast between text and background colours. The menu buttons on the left-hand side were also difficult to read because a patterned background had been used.

Menu buttons were made clearer by removing the patterned background and separating them from other images. Actually the buttons are a single image, with an accessible html image map that enables visitors to click through to other pages.

The redesigned home page has a larger font-size. Darkgrey text on a white background makes it much easier to read than before.

Out of date

The home page was very static with little in the way of new content. Therefore staff might have assumed that nothing new was being published on the Intranet.

The home page now automatically displays the most recent news items, events, vacancies and announcements as they are published in various sections of the Intranet. Automation has cut down on the amount of duplication involved.We also added an email link at the bottom of the page so that staff can suggest changes and send the editor new content for the site.

Difficult to find information

A real problem on an Intranet. Links were difficult to read, there were links to empty pages and the search facility was broken.

I deleted all the redundant pages from the Intranet. The problem with the search facility was referred to Baptcare’s IT dept and to the web design company.

The technology

The Baptcare Intranet is based on IBM Websphere, a complex document management system. Redesigning the home page involved making changes to CSS and HTML and to various other files used in the Websphere templates.

There were limitations. I couldn’t make changes to the banner and menu at the top of the page because they have to stay the same as on other pages of the site.

The results

Staff were given no warning that the Intranet home page was going through a redesign but they couldn’t help but notice the next time they opened their browser. All the comments so far have been complimentary and staff have told me they straight away went to see what was new and discovered content they’d not been aware of before. The new home page has succeeded in making the Intranet more accessible.

Jason would be interested in helping you improve your Intranet – contact at jason@kingjason.co.uk.