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…

Baptcare is large nonprofit organisation providing care services in the state of Victoria, Australia. With over 760 staff based in several dozen locations, working in very different projects, good internal communication is vital. That’s why their Intranet is so important to them.

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. >> Read more…

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…

I’m at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane, Australia. Rather then me tell you all about it, find out what’s happening here from various conference delegates’ blogs.

Today I gave a presentation about how to plan the development of your nonprofit’s website, and here’s the slideshow that accompanied it.

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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…

You’re not alone. If you’re responsible for your nonprofit’s website and you’d like to talk to someone about it there are places you can go for support and to share ideas.

The Charity Web Forum is a Yahoo group for the managers and designers of charity websites. There’s some good, frequent discussion and it’s well-worth signing up, reading other peoples’ messages and joining in the conversation.

The TechSoup website gives advice about technology to nonprofits: it publishes articles about web design as well as hosting discussions about web building.

The ICT Hub’s web design forum isn’t as busy as TechSoup’s but it’s still worth posting a message, especially if you’re in the UK.

There are also conferences and other events where you can meet other charity website owners. In the UK there are the ICT Hub’s conferences, in Australia check out the Making Links conference;  and in the US you’re spoilt for choice but see what NTEN have to offer.

If you’re developing your charity’s website, what’s the worst that could happen? Well, here are some horror stories that I’ve been told by nonprofit organisations and a few lessons we can draw from their experiences. >> Read more…

Planning your charity’s new website should be a structured task. You need to think about who your audience is, what images to use, the look and style, what content you’ll be publishing, and your hosting requirements; and you should consider all these points before commissioning a web designer. Sounds daunting? Not if you use this worksheet to help you plan your organisation’s website (PDF, 80kb). >> Read more…