I’ve been working with a few Non-Profits recently, getting them online in such a way that they won’t incur an ongoing expense every time they want to update their website. I’ve been putting these sites on applications that will create backlinks via update service pings and rss subscriptions, and allow ongoing development. These sites offer search engine friendly urls that are easily read and understood by people too.

I’ve been using either WordPress as a CMS or the more enterprise level ModX CMS for these sites, depending on expected complexity, traffic, and future need. It’s wonderful to be able to put the power into the hands of my clients. The fact that they can update their own sites in short order allows them to get that much more information up that much more often. And this pays off in myriad ways. When a site is updated often, the Search Engines, and especially Google, spider it more often. For a Non-Profit which depends on donations, that can make a big difference in the bottom line.

When the right application is chosen, one that is easy for folks in the organization to use, and that will automagically update all navigation throughout the site every time a page is created and published, it’s an incentive to build it out strong, rather than being satisfied with a small brochure site limited to a few pages. The more content that is built, the more the spiders will come, followed by more traffic.

Both WordPress and ModX allow for slim, sleek xhtml/css code, which gives a better code to content ratio so that search engine spiders have more content to chew. And updating a look at some future point is a simple template change. There is no trauma from broken links or other wankiness in a frontend update since the new template or theme is simply installed onto the existing dynamically generated site. No muss, no fuss!

And if the Non-Profit has merchandise to sell for fundraising, both WordPress and ModX have ecommerce modules available.

If your non-profit organization’s website is stagnating, parked on a backwater dirt road of the Information Superhighway, maybe now is the time to tune her up and get her moving. Let’s talk.

Technorati Tags: non-profit web design, wordpress as a cms, modx themes for non profits

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 10:45 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.