I mentioned this in an earlier post, The Technology Startup Guide for Non-Profits, but I thought it would be good to go into a bit more depth here.
In the previous post, I recommended using WordPress or Joomla to run a basic, but professional looking, website for your non-profit. While this hasn’t really changed, I would strongly suggest looking to WordPress. I deployed a Joomla based site for a non-profit in Washington DC and although the site functions and is solid, there is a serious learning curve for your average user. WordPress has such a simple backend that I can completely recommend it, even for the most novice user.
WordPress is known for it’s “Famous Five-Minute Install“ Once you make sure your host supports the required technology (Don’t worry, almost all reputable hosts do) the actual install only take a few minutes. You’ll spend more time uploading the files to your hosting account than you will installing the software. Even if you aren’t comfortable doing this yourself, nearly any volunteer with a bit of technical ability can deliver a flawless install.
If you have decided to use another program for your main website, you can install WordPress at a subdomain, such as blog.yournonprofit.org or in a folder, www.yournonprofit.org/blog. Either option is good, but the best way to install is to install in the root, or main portion, of your website. Search engines appreciate fresh content and by using the blog as your main site, you will provide plenty of new content to the search engines. Just because you use WordPress doesn’t mean that your site has to just be a blog. WordPress allows you to display a static page as the main page, or your most recent blog posts. If you want to use the site predominantly as a webpage, then set the site to show a page, not the posts. You can do this from the Admin Dashboard. Simply click Settings–>Reading–>Front Page Displays.
As I mentioned, the interface for WordPress is very, very simple. With the most recent version, 2.7.1, you have the ability to customize the Admin Dashboard. You can easily see how many posts, pages and comments you have on your site. You can also use QuickPress to write quick posts and publish them, well, quickly. The organization of your posts and pages inside WordPress is very logical. You have the ability to change the URL to include the name of the post, the date published and many other variables. Compared to Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke and others, WordPress has the most straight-forward interface. Even if you, or your intern that updates the site, don’t possess a great deal of technical know-how, you’ll be just fine. There are also plenty of tutorials on the WordPress.org site to help you.
This brings me to the third reason you should use WordPress: the community. WordPress has a thriving community that is very willing to help newbies and answer questions/solve problems for more experienced users. Before you even use the community, you will find a wealth of information on the WordPress.org site. The community is made up of mostly volunteers that cruise the forums hoping to help others and willing to share their knowledge.
The community is more than a forum though. The members of the WordPress community also develop plugins and themes for WordPress. Plugins are pieces of software that add functions to WordPress. They range from Search Engine Optimization plugins to contact forms to social media interfaces. A quick Google search reveals 31.5 million pages for the term “WordPress Theme.” Themes allow you to completely change the design and layout of your blog or site with a few clicks. The WordPress.org site has hundreds of free themes and a quick search on Google will reveal many, many more. You can also choose to pay for professional themes, but I think you will find more than enough professional themes available for free.
Even if you cannot find a suitable and free plugin or theme, another plus for WordPress is that it’s built on common and free technology. Without getting too technical, the site uses PHP, CSS, and MySQL. PHP, or Personal Home Page, is a scripting language that WordPress uses to create pages and posts. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a way to style information written in HTML. Finally, MySQL is a relational database that WordPress uses to store and retrieve information. While you don’t need to know any of these technologies to use WordPress, you should feel confident that any web designer or developer worth their salt understands them and can use them to customize your site.
A word of caution. As I mentioned in the first post on non-profits and social media, please be serious about using blogging to connect to your donors and volunteers. If you don’t plan, or can’t spend the time, to blog on a regular basis, don’t call your site a blog. Just call it a website that you update every once in a while. Arriving at a ‘blog’ that hasn’t been updated in months or years is a turnoff. People visit blogs because they enjoy the interaction and the personal level of communication. If you can’t update your site, people are going to visit, realize that you aren’t really ‘blogging’ and dismiss you. It’s better to be honest about what you’re doing than to attempt to ‘blog’ because it seems cool or trendy.
Don’t feel limited to just discuss your organization. People like to interact with blogs and the organizations that blog. So publish a small article about another non-profit in your area. They don’t even have to serve the same group that you do. Make sure you link to other non-profits. Discuss emerging trends in your field or issues facing your community. Don’t worry, I’ll touch on many of these issues later in a Social Media Best Practices post.
Bottom line: WordPress is simple to install and manage, has a great user community to help you with any problems, is highly customizable, easily made more functional with free plugins and themes, and just works. If you’re still using a simple HTML page or one of those “Click to Build” sites that many hosts offer, the time has come to refine your image.
