Nonprofit web design

The Slideshare website has published the results of its presentation competition. The winner was an educational slideshow about worldwide water usage. Although not created by a nonprofit, it’s excellent inspiration for charities that want to put across a campaigning message. Notice how simple it is, with carefully chosen fonts and colour scheme and images from a photo library. You could do this!

Slideshare is a website that allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share them with the world. You can then easily insert those presentations into your own website (just like I’ve done here) by pasting code that Slideshare provides into your web pages.

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Over the past year I’ve struggled to get the Baptcare website to validate when tested against http://validator.w3.org/. My problem was the complexity of the IBM WebCM content management system that powers the Baptcare website and figuring out how to understand and edit its presentation templates, menus and navigation files.

But today I finally got the www.baptcare.org.au website to validate – and it’s only taken a whole year, hurrah!

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A Content Management System (CMS) can be installed behind your website, enabling you to quickly and easily create new pages and post news items onto your site. Many CMS are free and open source which makes them ideal for nonprofit use.

If your web designer suggests building your new website using Drupal or Joomla or MODx or any one of the hundred other open source CMS out there, how do you know if you’ll like it or even get the hang of it? Well, you could visit the OpenSourceCMS website and try it out. This excellent website gives you full admin rights to some of the best CMS so you can give them a try and play around with all their features.

I recently announced that I’d been given a Google Grant to create free online ads to promote Greek Care. Two weeks later, are hordes of visitors pounding on the doors of this new nonprofit website? Er, no… not yet anyway.

That would an embarrassing end to that topic, if it weren’t for the succcess I’ve had with Baptcare’s ad campaign, which recently doubled its site traffic. Why is that one nonprofit ad campaign works whilst another doesn’t? Here are some thoughts and ideas… Read more »

In the first of several posts I’m going to suggest why your nonprofit organisation should apply for a Google Grant and how it can boost visits to your website. The example I’ll be using is the Greek Care website, a recently commissioned site for care providers looking after Greek elderly people in Australia. Read more »

Baptcare is large nonprofit organisation providing care services in the state of Victoria, Australia. With over 760 staff based in several dozen locations, working in very different projects, good internal communication is vital. That’s why their Intranet is so important to them.

An Intranet is like a website except that it’s only available to people working within the organisation. It’s used to share information internally rather than to publicly promote the organisation’s services. Recently I redesigned Baptcare’s Intranet home page. Read more »

Did you know that Melbourne has the biggest Greek population outside of Greece? That’s why I was commissioned to design the Greek Care website by Fronditha, a charity in Victoria, Australia. The website, which launched this week, provides information and advice about the care of elderly Greek people.

The website was developed using the free and open source WordPress content management system to make it easy for non-web designers to publish and edit pages.

I’d like to tell you how that project was tackled, and how various plugins were installed to add extra functionality to the basic CMS. Read more »

Ever wondered how your web stats compare to those of other nonprofit organisations? Are you getting fewer visits than is average for an organisation of your size? Or are your visitors spending more time and looking at more pages on your website than on those of other charities? Now you have a way to find out, because since February 2008 Google Analytics has been offering benchmarking reports.

Here’s a screenshot showing an example of a benchmarking report. The thick blue line is the website being monitored; the thin black line shows the average visits and page views for other, similar-sized charities. Read more »