Wednesday, January 11, 2012

The Profits of a Good Nonprofit Website Design

Internet has emerged today as the most efficient medium of communication between people across the globe. Internet is the new way to socialize and to provide as well as gather information. Any company or group that aims to reach out to the masses needs to have its presence felt on the internet. Websites are the key to sharing - sharing knowledge, thoughts, ideas and notions. Websites educate the masses about a company and they act as an interactive portal.

A Nonprofit Organization (NPO) is social in nature. People come together for a cause and establish an NPO. Thereafter, most NPOs gather their funds through donations or charitable events. A majority of NPOs operate in the field of charities, religion or social work. In all these areas, interaction with people is of prime importance. Right from its establishment, an NPO is supported by people and new members and volunteers keep joining from time to time. In order to maximize their reach, NPOs should take help of the internet and create an effective website. This website can educate the people about the goals, mission and objectives of the NPO and it can act as a portal to share videos, messages and to host discussions. Donations can also be collected online and this serves as a convenient means of allowing donors to contribute from any place in the world at any time they desire.

In today's tech savvy world, a person resorts to Google or Bing or Yahoo to search for all kind of information. NPOs must ensure that they have an efficient website design. The nonprofit website design and its contents will speak for the NPO itself. While designing a nonprofit website, a few key points need consideration



1. Choosing the right design
A website must be pleasing to the eyes so that it can engage the reader for a longer time. A good nonprofit website design will typically have a professional look. An appealing color scheme and a non-clustered layout are important factors in giving a professional look to a website.

2. Information and Informative
The website must ensure that its contents give out maximum information to the readers. Content can be in the form of text, images and even videos. This information must be properly organized in different sections. Navigation through these different sections must be easy and hence menu bars and other navigation links must be appropriately designed. Apart from giving information, website also acts as a platform to collect information. Registration of new members and volunteers is an example of data collection. Thus, forms are another important feature to be captured in the design of a nonprofit website. Websites must also have the right content to ensure that they show up quickly on search engines. The articles in a website can be optimized for search engines to allow these websites to feature in the first few search results.

3. Donations
Most NPOs meet their expenses through donations. Tools like PayPal can allow a user to make a contribution in just a couple of clicks. However, it is also crucial that NPOs maintain a database of donations and donors. In the event of a fundraiser, mass mailers and newsletters can be sent out to the list of donors maintained in the database in just a few seconds.

4. Online Stores
If an NPO sells souvenirs or any merchandise, setting up an online store is a good way to reach more people. However, creating an online store from scratch is pretty time consuming. NPOs can take help from professionals and plugin customizable store widgets into their websites.

5. Get more social
Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace - these applications are not only a part of the internet browser on a pc but they have also found their way into the palms of our hands through smartphones. To keep in touch with members, volunteers and donors these web applications can provide good connectivity.

The benefits of hosting a website are multifold and in case of nonprofits, this means raising more donations and getting more people involved. It might be time consuming to develop a nonprofit website design from scratch. Hiring a professional team for website design can be cheaper and quicker than creating it from scratch. The team can also help an NPO in web hosting and regular maintenance of the website. The quicker an NPO goes on the internet, the better are its chances of gaining visibility and support.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6796873

2 komentar:

Aaricevans said...

Nice tips you have shared here about design. It helped me and will help to many other people.
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magi said...

Nice post. I like the way you start and then conclude your thoughts.
The credibility of your company is reflected through the website.
Website Development Melbourne

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