Nonprofit web design

I’m at the Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia. It’s a forum for workers from non-profit organisations to discuss ICT.

Yesterday’s all-day workshop, by Laurel Papworth, was about social networking. Laurel’s a great trainer and it was an interesting session that covered so much I can’t do justice to it here.

What’s social networking? Well, it covers a wide variety of online tools and websites that enable people to make friends, find people with similar interests, socialise, form discussion groups and share video, photos and information. For example, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, blogs and even games such as World of Warcraft are all social networking tools. 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 »

The Getting Attention! blog is written by Nancy Schwartz. It’s a source of great ideas, tactics, and tips to help nonprofit organisations succeed through effective marketing. Recently Nancy has writen about search engine optimisation. SEO is all about making your website more effective and getting well-rated by search engines. Nancy gives this example of why SEO matters to your charity:

Let’s say you are a small AIDS prevention nonprofit in Boise, Idaho.  It’s December 30, and several Boise residents have logged onto Google to find a charity for a…donation/last minute tax deduction.  It’s likely that potential donors will do a Google search for “boise aids charity.”  But if your nonprofit doesn’t pop-up near the top of the search results, these donors may never find you. Read more »

The Wild Apricot website has published an excellent article about free and simple tools you can use to get more visitors to visit your website. They explain how you could benefit from using blogs, video broadcasts, rss, surveys, photo sharing and social networking. For each tool, several examples are given of not-for-profit organisations that have benefited from using them.

So if you already have a website but want to take it one step further, read about the 8 free tools to promote your association’s website.

A volunteer could give their time and skills to help you build your website. However, you need to think carefully about your expectations and their motivations, be realistic about what can be achieved and how quickly, and plan for the inevitable time when your volunteer decides to quit. Here are some thoughts on how to find and manage website volunteers. Read more »

Blind people can use software to read aloud the content from websites but only if those websites are designed properly. A federal court judge in California has issued two landmark decisions against the Target Corporation, a retail company, because their website was inaccessible to blind people. Read more »

Relate London North West is a branch of the relationship counselling charity.

I designed their website using standards-compliant html and css. Only a limited colour palette was used, to reflect the charity’s branding. The ‘heads’ graphic and logo were supplied by Relate.

The website has a simple structure of pages and sub-pages, but no posts or news items.

This Relate website is built around WordPress, a free and open source content management system (CMS). This enables Relate to publish pages on their website and easily make changes to text and images. WordPress is a great tool for small charities who want to have control over their own website content.

To see the website I designed for Relate visit www.relatelondonnw.org.uk.

Between July and September 2007 The Joseph Rowntree Foundation asked the public to consider what social evils face the UK today.

The Social Evils website lists the result of a web survey of 3,500 people and discussions with groups whose voices are not usually heard. I designed the mini-website for the consultation.

The website was developed using WordPress, a free and open source content management system. It enables the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to easily publish pages on their website.

The brief was to create a very simple WordPress template to match the JRF’s corporate image.