With a few exceptions, all my websites are designed around the WordPress content management system (CMS) which enables you to take control of your own website and easily make changes to its content. WordPress is one of the best tools a small non-profit organisation can use to run its website.
WordPress helps you keep your website up-to-date
You can create new pages, rearrange the order of pages,write and format text, insert images and video clips. Links pages are easy to create.
WordPress is also a blogging tool so you can publish news articles that are automatically archived by month and visitors so your visitors can search for them. Also, your visitors can subscribe to every news item you write using a very simple technology called RSS that’s built into Internet Explorer, Outlook 2007 and many other popular software these days. That makes WordPress a great choice for running campaigns and promotions.
Using WordPress means never having to pay your web designer to do simple updates. You just login to your website with a password and start making edits.
It’s easy to learn
You won’t need to send yourself on a training course to learn how to use WordPress: it’s fairly intuitive, most people figure it out themselves and are confidently writing their website within a few hours. You can learn a lot by watching the training videos on www.wordpress.tv. However, if you plan to have several people writing content for your website or you intend to have a very large website, a short group training session would be advisable.
WordPress is very flexible
WordPress is often thought of as a blogging tool but it can do so much more than that. Take a look at how different these WordPress-based websites are from one another:
There are frequent upgrades and improvements
WordPress has a very active community of users and developers committed to its development. New editions come out regularly and as well as making security fixes they also bring new useful features and improvements. WordPress is also more accessible out-of-the-box than many CMS, although in the end it’s the quality of the individual theme that counts.
WordPress is free
For cash-strapped charities, that’s obviously a good thing. However, a free product isn’t necessarily cost-effective in the long-term: what about the cost of installing it and the staff time spent learning to use it? Good news is it’s quick and easy for a web designer to install, and easy for you to learn.
WordPress is open source
That means that any web developer can see WordPress’s underlying code and customise any part of it to their own needs. Plus when it’s installed within your website no-one can take it away from you. It’s a flexible, adaptable tool and it’s easy to find a web designers with experience of working with it.
There are hundreds of great free themes you can download
You can easily change the look and style of your website. Either download and install a free theme from www.wordpress.org/extend/themes/ or commission a web designer to create a theme to match your organisation’s branding.
Need a WordPress developer?
I would be happy to discuss your needs and help you decide whether WordPress is the right tool for your charity website. You can also hire me to install WordPress and themes, to design new themes or customise the way your existing website works.
Alternatives to WordPress
WordPress isn’t the only CMS on the market: there are many other simple free and open source alternatives as well as some far more complex paid-for systems. On the ICT Hub Knowledgebase’s website is an article about choosing a CMS and Smashing magazine suggests 10 things to consider when choosing a CMS.
