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“I can’t wait for this month’s edition of [your charity name]’s email newsletter!” – No-one, ever. Let me try something else to see if this sounds more familiar. You send out a monthly email newsletter to all your email subscribers because that’s what you’ve always done, and maybe because you still post out printed newsletters […]

When building or commissioning a new website, one of the most important considerations is the Content Management System (CMS) you’ll build the site with. Get it wrong, and it can cost you a lot of time and money to rectify down the line. “Our current site is too restrictive – it’s too hard to add/edit […]

Here I’ll share a template you can use when creating a tender / Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development of a new charity website. I’ll also give you some tips as to what to include and provide an agency/freelancer’s perspective on the process. Download our charity website brief / tender / RFP document template […]

Spoiler alert: no. Someone asked us the other day if we can make sites with carousels/sliders to rotate different content on the homepage, because not many of the sites in our portfolio have them. So here’s the short answer: Yes, we can. And here’s the longer one: Yes we can, but we generally advise clients […]

I’m now fifty-three pages into the worldwide bestseller ‘The Life-changing Magic of Tidying’ by Marie Kondo.  And I’m hooked (not least by her instructions on how to fold socks). How a subject so mundane can be so captivating is a bit of a mystery, especially given that what I’ve read so far boils down to […]

You’re busy, lazy, or maybe reading this whilst watching The X Factor so let’s cut straight to the chase… 1People relate to people Your cause, your mission, your innovative approach, your shocking statistics, your lovely bar chart, your ROI and low admin costs are all great – but we humans reserve our most emotional responses […]

If you were following part one when we built a donations form using Gravity Forms and Paypal, then you’re hopefully up and running and have tested it out on your site. The next step is to hook it up to your Google Analytics account so you can start tracking where all these donors are coming from. […]

In a previous blog post I talked about what makes a good donation form for a small charity. Here’s a tutorial on how to build your own. This recipe combines technologies that are commonly used on charity websites – WordPress, Gravity Forms, Paypal and Mailchimp. Because of their popularity and ubiquity, it’s relatively easy to set […]

Hacked charity websites seem to have been in the news a lot recently. Having your site hacked can be a pretty traumatising experience, and if it’s not quickly fixed it can incur big reputational risks, loss of income and the need to send some really awkward emails to your supporters telling them that their data […]

I’ve had a few people ask how to replicate the animated navigation bar effect used on one of my example sites. I’m not sure how best to describe it – the tabs kind of slide up as you hover over them. It’s easier to just see it in action: This example uses a Genesis framework […]