Nonprofit web design

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 »

Online discussion forums enable your website’s visitors to have a conversation. Your website could host a busy virtual community; and if you are a health organisation you could even use forums to provide an Internet-based support network. In 2007 the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust won an eWellbeing award for its use of online forums in building social networks. This case study explains what was learnt along the way. 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 »

Nonprofit organisations can put a lot of time, effort into their website, but if no-one looks at it, that effort is wasted. This article discusses how you can promoting your organisation’s website to increase its impact.

Website promotion is something that is often overlooked. In order to get noticed your website will need to have compelling content, be well designed, have a strong presence on search engines, and a marketing strategy. And in order to judge the success of your site you need to be able to find out how many people visit your site and what they look at, so let’s look at the last of those first. Read more »

When I ask charities about their backup routines, they all know they should backup their documents, their emails and so on but few mention their website. That’s an unfortunate oversight because it’s fairly easy to lose control of your own website and it’s good practice to have backups and documentation to hand – just in case. Read more »

Buying a .org.uk domain name is inexpensive, from £20 per year, but once you’ve put a website address on your letterhead and email addresses on your business cards, losing or changing it can be costly. Unfortunately, the ownership of domains can sometimes be disputed, requiring negotiation, arbitration and associated costs. Read more »

Google is the best-known and most popular search engine and it searches billions of web pages to find matches for the keywords you type in. By and large it does a good job so why would your charity want to make its own search engine? Let’s take two common scenarios: Read more »

Here are two questions every organisation should be able to answer: how many visits were there to your website last month and which pages were the most looked at? Do you know? Your statistics are a useful tool in helping you prove the worth of your website – and by extension your organisation - to your trustees and funders. Read more »