Nonprofit web design

Next Door is a nonprofit organisation in the US that provides intervention and prevention services for domestic violence. They wanted a new website and wanted it quickly. This is what we built together using WordPress.

We decided, to keep costs down and to enable the site to be built quickly, to use a premium pre-built WordPress theme called Allure by StudioPress. The Allure theme is well designed and comes with a handy slideshow on the home page to display featured content, and room for adverts in the right column. It cost US$60.

Next Door then asked a graphic artist to redesign the look of the theme, changing the images and colour scheme; after which I changed the theme’s code to match the new style.

Once WordPress had been installed and configured and the theme implemented. I gave the organisation advice, helping them to understand how to use WordPress to enter their own content, pages and news.

» Visit the Next Door website

In recent weeks I’ve had to rescue a few websites: a WordPress site that had been hacked, a static HTML site that had simply vanished, and a nonprofit e-commerce website with a database that had crashed under the weight of its own data.

Websites getting hacked is a real concern and it can happen to any organisation. That’s why this post, on the Wild Apricot blog, is such a useful read: When Nonprofit Websites Go Bad.

You should heed the advice on upgrading your software: if you use WordPress then upgrade when new versions come out; and whenever you login check if you need to upgrade plugins.

I’d add another suggestion: get a free Google Webmaster Tools account. If your sites does get hacked you can get an early warning by email, and after you’ve repaired the site you can request Google reinstate your website in its results. Plus you’ll get a shedload of useful tools for checking how well your site performs in search engines.