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I’ve made a couple of these posts in previous years and I’ve been through the websites of the top 100 charities (it’s a fairly arbitrary list based on the charities with the highest income at the time) to identify patterns or themes in their designs. I’ve just gone through and taken screenshots of the same […]

The WordPress ‘Block editor’ (known within the WP community as ‘Gutenberg’) has been around since the launch of WP v5 in January 2019. It’s fair to say that it divided opinion at the time, with many developers feeling like it was being released before the bugs were ironed out, and whilst the user interface was […]

When emergency strikes you might find that your current website can’t handle the traffic that comes your way. Or you might want to create a new site that loads blazingly fast for anyone using even the slowest of mobile connections. Setting up a new WordPress/Drupal/other CMS site probably isn’t the best solution for your needs […]

I love WordPress and use it every day. But one of the issues with it is that you can’t just leave a WordPress site untendered for months or years without expecting security problems. It’s important to keep your version of WordPress and your site’s Themes and Plugins up-to-date in order to keep them safe from […]

This is a follow up to a previous post looking at the top charity websites in 2018. Again I’ve created this screenshot gallery so you can see them side by side, and I’ve made some attempt to group similar charities together. What’s new in 2019? It’s continuing the trend away from rotating sliders/carousels and towards […]

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of those things that as website owners/managers we’re aware of, and we know that it is important, but often don’t know what exactly is it and how do you do it? It can be a specialised subject and there are many people and companies who solely specialise in providing […]

Don’t call them ‘case studies’ in any public-facing materials I hope that’s obvious, but I’ll say it just in case. ‘Case studies’ are things in your M&E reports. They sound clinical and they bring to mind rather dry outcomes and outputs. For the purposes of this blog post though,  I’ll refer to them as ‘case […]

It’s October 2005. I’m sat in one of the country’s most-revered charities, clutching my first ever copywriting brief. Two hours in, it’s Blank Screen 1: Copywriter 0. I’d been working at Comic Relief for a while when I landed a job as their junior copywriter.  Bingo. But an hour before lunch on day one, it […]

If you’re adventurous enough to want to build your own WordPress charity website (or maybe you just haven’t got the money to invest in an agency/freelancer to do it for you) then here’s my quick guide to how I’d go about it if I were you. If you are on a tight budget you might […]

I ran a charity website (and indeed whole digital department) for six years (for War Child). I had come from a communications background (at Comic Relief) and was reasonably IT literate, but had never been solely responsible for a charity’s website before. In the years since I have worked with, and spoken to, dozens of […]