Nonprofit web design

Today I visited Grampians disAbility Advocacy Association who won their website in a competition. I’m driving round Victoria surveying small nonprofits’ IT needs and capabilities; I always ask who designed their website but don’t tend to get so unusual an answer.

The competition was called Full Code Press and pitted an Australian team against a New Zealand team. Team members were thrown together to design a nonprofit’s website and had only a day to plan and design it. Someone involved described it as a geek Olympics! Read more »

The DesignMag website has an article listing 40+ inspirational non-profit website designs. My favourite has to be the Housing Works website for its big, bold home page images. Refresh the page to see the different photos, showing a random picture is one way to make your site look fresher. Notice how overlaying transparent images gives the site design an illusion of depth and substance.

The d’bug blog lists 10 inspiring and beautiful non-profit web designs. I especially liked the New York City Coalition Against Hunger website. Take a look at its Google Maps mashup which helps you find local soup kitchens. The blog is very relevant, commenting on the progress of legislation and current hunger and poverty issues. Interesting photo gallery too, using Flash to display postcards of the faces of hunger. Inspired yet?

On a contrary note, as Confessions of a Nonprofit Executive Director points out, web beauty is only skin-deep and whilst the 40 inspirational website all look great, they’ve not all been well coded (but read the comments to his article for some friendly disagreement).

I designed the website for Hillingdon Refugee Support Group. It was built using WordPress as the content management system so the charity can easily add their own pages and text and photos. I designed the theme from scratch.

Notice how well this website has been designed for SEO? That stands for Search Engine Optimisation and means that your website is likely to get well-rated by search engines like Google. What SEO techniques have ben used on this website? Read more »

The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust’s candle tributes website is one of the more interesting, worthwhile and challenging web projects I’ve worked on.

The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust, an organisation that I’ve worked with on and off for the last eight years, commissioned me to design a new mini-website. The site gives women (and their partners) who have lost a child to an ectopic pregnancy, opportunity to light a candle and leave a message in remembrance. Read more »

Kathy Reid has written about how she designed a new website for the Bonnie Babes Foundation, a nonprofit organisation. It’s interesting because, as she points out, each of the software tools is completely and absolutely free. Read kathy’s article about finding an open source email and web solution.

Kathy’s blog is the only one I know where you can read about both web design and knitting!

On my last day as Baptcare’s website and Intranet editor, my final task was to create a landing page for their charity golf event.

Here’s the result, designed and coded with valid HTML within only a few hours. The design has simple, attractive typography using Baptcare’s corporate colours. However, this landing page looks nothing like the usual template used elsewhere on the Baptcare website, it’s a complete one-off. Baptcare’s usual template is too restrictive, not eye-catching enough to use as a landing page.

What is a landing page? Usually it’s defined as a page that visitors will arrive at directly via an advert or link on another website. A landing pages might not be linked to from an organisation’s own site at all, only from banners or adverts on external sites or from ads on postcards or other printed media. Read more »

Today, at the Making Links conference 2008 , we held a one-day event about web development where I gave a presentation about managing a non-profit organisation’s website. Here are the slides:

Read more »

Andrews Edwards from Huge Object spoke at Making Links 2008 about how nonprofits can work with web developers.

It was an interesting talk – Andrew has had plenty of experience working with nonprofits - and you can see the slideshow here: