Nonprofit web design

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 »

Andrew Perry demonstrated a free and open-source product called CiviCRM at the Connecting Up conference. It’s a customer relationshop management tool that you can install on your own webspace; and if you use either Drupal or Joomla to run your website, then CiviCRM can integrate with it.

CiviCRM helps you manage your relationships with donors and supporters, sign up people to attend your events, run your memberships and handle your email newsletters and other communications. Lots of nonprofits are using it and I can see why, it has a lot of very useful features. Read more »

I really like the PowerPoint slideshow that Emily Turner of Philanthropy Australia and Priscilla Brice-Weller of ANTar used in their presentation at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane. Apart from the clever way they divided the screen to give their individual perspectives on blogging, it’s also an interesting, short overview of why a nonprofit organisation might want to use a blog. Read more »

I’m at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane, Australia. Rather then me tell you all about it, find out what’s happening here from various conference delegates’ blogs.

Today I gave a presentation about how to plan the development of your nonprofit’s website, and here’s the slideshow that accompanied it.

| View | Upload your own

Caring Choices is a nationwide initiative to help shape future policy on long-term care for older people. More than 700 older people, carers and others were invited to share their experiences and views at events and on the website throughout 2007.

The Caring Choices website is based on WordPress, a free and open source content management system. It enables The King’s Fund and its partners to publish pages and articles onto their website; and for visitors to the site to leave their comments; and for visitors to subscribe to receive new articles. Read more »

MANSEO is short for Mother of All Nonprofit Search Engines Optimized. It’s a search engine that only searches nonprofit technology websites. Why might that interest you? Well, type in keywords about web design (I just tested it by typing “CSS”, “Joomla”, “donations”, “CMS”) and all the results should all be specific to nonprofits’ use of these technologies.

That makes Manseo a great tool for when you want to find examples of what’s worked for other charities, what’s good practice and what’s being discussed by your peers about any tech topic. Manseo currently searches 259 websites but more are being added by a small team of volunteers (I’m adding some UK and Australian websites).

The Addiction Search Engine was designed to help people find reliable information on the web about addiction-related issues. It uses the free Google Custom Search tool and was set up by the Ana Liffey Drug Project, a not-for-profit organisation in Ireland. This case study explains how they did it. Read more »