Top 10 Tips for a Charity Website

Top 10 Tips for a Charity website

1. Know Your website Purpose

This is probably the most important step. Everything else leads back to your website’s purpose and goals. Your website goals could include anything from converting visitors to members, informing existing members of latest news, building your email newsletter, building awareness, and collecting donations.

2. Make it Easy to Use

Everyone appreciates a website that is easy to use. The layout design should be consistent throughout the site, the menu should be easy to use, the text easy to read, and links easy to identify.

3. How to Get Involved

Let visitors know how they can become involved. Donating money is one way, but you should also suggest other ways they can get involved.

4. Accept Donations / Subscriptions

You should have a donation or subscriptions button that is obvious and easy to find. Accepting online credit card donations is easier than you may think. Including a funding goal is also a good idea. This let’s members and visitors feel part of achieving a common goal.

5. Keep in Touch

Allow your visitors to easily stay in touch with what you are doing. Provide an email newsletter sign up box, and have links to your Twitter and Facebook pages.

6. Use video

video is the way of the future. It doesn’t need to be fancy, most digital cameras can now take video. As well as using the video clip on your own website, upload it to YouTube and other video sharing sites to gain leverage.

7. Contact Information

Make it easy for visitors to find your contact details. Don’t just have a contact page, but also include your contact details in a side-block or in your site’s footer.

8. Ongoing Maintenance

Use a Content Management System website(CMS), so you can edit your website yourself. This will allow you to keep your website up-to-date and relevant. One such CMS framework is Joomla. This framework is extremely powerful and can be easily extended to grow as your website does.

9. Write for Search

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing only read text. They read all the text on your website, so give some thought to write the words that people are searching for. And, were you are using images, ensure you have included alternative text tags (Alt Text) to allow the search engines to understand your content better.

10. Measure the Results

Use Google Analytics to track how visitors find your website, and what they are looking at. Otherwise it’s difficult to measure how well your website is achieving its goals.

Chocolate Lime Web Design are
based in West Lothian, Scotland. Chocolate Lime provide
company logo design, highly functional,
clean,

search engine friendly websites tailored to reflect the image of your
business

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/fundraising-articles/top-10-tips-for-a-charity-website-1648905.html

Related Blogs

Nonprofits | salinarockson January 1, 2010

3 Comments to “Top 10 Tips for a Charity Website”

By itsallgood420j, June 1, 2010 @ 1:14 am

Nice! I don’t mind an fun post once in a while! They don’t all need tobe so serious ;-P … I sit all day at work in front of a computer and I need something to keep me awake and entertained, lol. Thanks again. Cya

F. Wilson
Fingertip pulse oximeter
By Web hosting companies, June 5, 2010 @ 6:32 pm

For example: if we had a site with 30 pages averaging 8 KB each, 50 KB worth of images in each page, and 50 visitors each day who viewed an average of 4 pages, you would have the following formula:[8 KB + 50 KB] * [50 visitors * 4 pages] * [30] = 348,000 KB So we would be using 348,000 KB, or approximately 340 MB, of bandwidth each month. Well within the limitations of our hosting plans. It’s hard to generalize how much data transfer a site will use without looking at it specifically, but in most cases it is very rare for a personal or small business site to use more than one gigabyte (GB) of data transfer in a month. Starting with a data transfer limit of one gigabyte per month is probably appropriate for most new sites. If your average web page is 20Kb in size. 1 Gig of transfer allows for well over 50,000 hits per month at that size! If your average page size is smaller obviously more hits per month.
By Best web design companies, June 7, 2010 @ 9:44 am

The Zune concentrates on being a Portable Media Player. Not a web browser. Not a game machine. Maybe in the future it’ll do even better in those areas, but for now it’s a fantastic way to organize and listen to your music and videos, and is without peer in that regard. The iPod’s strengths are its web browsing and apps. If those sound more compelling, perhaps it is your best choice.