Nonprofit web design

I designed the website for the Council for Voluntary Services in Hounslow. This is an independent body that supports, advises and represents all voluntary groups in the London Borough of Hounslow.

Their old website was just a single page with a few logos. They wanted something better, designed to match their colour scheme, with far more content. Importantly, they must be able to edit the content themselves and publish regular news items.

I designed the website using WordPress as the content management system (CMS). WordPress is an easy enough tool for the staff at Hounslow CVS to use to edit their website’s pages and posts. Read more »

The Nominet Foundation is a charity that provides funding to innovative projects which strive to improve and encourage the safe use of the Internet for educational, inclusion and other charitable purposes. They give grants to organisations with innovative IT-related projects that can make a positive difference to people in the UK, developing countries and around the world.

Initial funding came from Nominet, which maintains the .uk register of domain names and is one of the world’s largest Internet registries.

On 29th April 2009 the Nominet Foundation announced the first projects to be funded. Read more »

At the outset of working with a charity I ask for their logo and often find it’s unsuitable for use on  their website. It’s not uncommon to find the logo’s only half an inch high when printed and fuzzy round the edges. Some logos are emailed to me embedded in a Word document – not a proper image format. I once received a logo in the post. No, not on a CD, on paper. Presumably the sender thought I could scan it in and that would be good enough.

This request is mainly for smaller charities, many of which don’t have decent quality logos. Please get your logo fixed. Not it won’t just benefit your website but also your signage, your newsletter and any other kind of publicity. Unless you have a talented volunteer graphic designer handy, there will be a cost – but it’s worth it.  Read more »

Currently 10% of charities’ donations are collected online but recent research by Jakob Neilsen has found that if charities’ websites provided better information, they would get far more donations. The main problem is that non-profits fail to provide the information that people need to make a decision about donating their money. Specifically charities are not providing clear details of:

• The organisation’s mission, goals, objectives, and work.
• How it uses donations and contributions.

But these are the main factors on which users base their decision to donate. To quote Jakob,

Sadly, only 43% of the sites we studied answered the first question on their homepage. Further, only a ridiculously low 4% answered the second question on the homepage. Although organizations typically provided these answers somewhere within the site, users often had problems finding this crucial information. Read more »

More than sixty people gathered in Galway, Ireland in April 2009 to talk, learn, and exchange ideas about Drupal. Drupal is a popular, reliable and very flexible content management system that’s used on many well-known websites. While they were there the attendees built free websites for two Irish charities. You can see the results at www.ruralsa.ie and www.zikomo.org. Both look great, well done to those involved!

Back in Australia the FullCodePress competition to build two charity websites has announced its team members and attempted to answer a tricky question: are events like this damaging to the web development community? I don’t think that charitable one-off events like this are anything other than a good idea. They’re nothing like design competition websites such as 99designs.com which encourage cookie cutter designs for minimum pay. At FullCodePress and the Drupal competition, professionals are pooling their skills to create quality products at no cost, purely for the challenge and the social good.

An article, published recently on the Web Designer Depot website, offers 8 tips to design a charity website. Each tip is illustrated with a screenshot of good practice in action on a nonprofit’s website. The tips are mainly related to fundraising and donations but scroll down the page for some great examples of good charity web design. There’s some good advice here and some inspiring design.

Email newsletters, how hard can they be? Well, I just set up an HTML e-newsletter campaign and it’s been a sometimes frustrating experience, but worthwhile because email is a great marketing tool. A great online application called MailChimp has made it much simpler. Read more »

The website of the World Glaucoma Association was nominated by Web Pages that Suck as one of the worst in the world. Glaucoma is a visual impairment and websites are supposed (and in many countries legally obliged) to be designed to meet the needs of disabled people.

Read more »