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.
Oops: A new website was built for a new educational project. Dreamweaver glitched when asked to delete a single file, deleting both the local and remote versions of all the files on the website. The work had to be recreated from scratch. Lesson: make multiple backups of your website.
Bad design: A charity’s website was designed by an amateur. The site design used outdated practices: font tags, frames, a table-based layout and style attributes in the html throughout many dozens of pages. When the corporate identity of the organisation changed they had to redesign the whole website. A standards-compliant design that uses HTML and CSS properly can save you a lot of bother later on.
Ownership issues: A health charity’s website was designed by a volunteer. They asked him for the passwords but he said don’t worry, it’s safe with me. He died unexpectedly the next week and it took three months to regain control of the site. Lesson: The charity should purchase domains and hosting and retain all passwords, not the designer.
Forgetfulness: A charity forgot to renew their domain name. The domain was legally purchased by someone in Hong Kong who then demanded a large amount of money to sell it back to them. Lesson: make sure you know the renewal date and put it in your diary.
To sum up: purchase your own domain name; don’t forget to renew it; have your site designed to current standards; and make multiple backups.
And please don’t have nightmares!
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