Most WordPress plugins are free but BackupBuddy is a premium plugin. For an annual fee of US $150 I can use it to back up an unlimited number of clients’ website, which makes it great value. I simply wouldn’t have time to backup a couple of dozen sites manually every week.

Once installed on your website, BackupBuddy checks that the hosting server’s settings are conducive to doing a backup, and if there are problems, gives you advice on how to resolve them. In practice, I’ve found that only about one in four hosting packages needs tweaking in some way.

The plugin also runs a check for malware – handy, because if your site has been hacked you can revert to a previous backup.

Unlike some backup plugins, it can backup everything: your MySQL database, WordPress core files, theme, uploaded images and documents. And it saves it as a single compressed file.

You can set up a schedule – I tend to do weekly backups but the can be daily, fortnightly or monthly – and BackupBuddy will automatically do the backup and send you an email to tell you it’s ready. Then you can login to WordPress and download the backup. Even better, you can have the backup sent to your Dropbox account, or sent by FTP to another location for safe keeping.

All in all, it’s a great plugin and a reliable solution to keeping your website safe and secure.

Here is a selection of well designed favicons. Can you guess which charities’ websites they’re from? Hover over the icon to find out, and click on the icon to visit their website.

The best Favicons are miniature design wonders, summing up a website using only the minimum of space. They are also a test of a good logo: could you reduce your logo to 16 pixels high by 16 pixels wide and still recognise it? Here are some of my favourite Favicons from charity websites: clicking on them will take you to the website itself. You can probably guess the identity of some of these charities just from their icon.

Here is perhaps the most straightforwardly appropriate of all .ico files. It’s the favicon from the website of the Information Commisioner’s Office and yes, it’s simply the acronym ICO.

So, do you want a Favicon? Find out from the Wild Apricot blog how to add a Favicon to your website.

Please note that WordPress may work slightly differently from shown in the video, if your website has additional plugins or has been customised. And WordPress gets upgraded and improved regularly. But most things should still look pretty much same!

The WordPress dashboard

Let’s start with an introduction to the WordPress dashboard, the first thing you see when you login to WordPress.

Writing and publishing a page

How to write a page – pages are a basic, everyday use of WordPress.

Writing and publishing a post

How to write a post – a post is like a news item, content that’s ordered by date and can be categorised.

Excerpts & the More tag

How to give your posts an excerpt – a short bit of text that sums up what the post is about.

Saving and returning to draft posts & pages

How to edit existing posts and pages – saving drafts of your content.

For more video tutorials visit WordPress.tv’s How To section.

Voluntary doesn’t mean amateur

Don’t ask a volunteer to design your website unless they have the same skills as a professional web designer. Interview them and ask to see other work that they’ve done, until you’re satisfied they can do the job properly. If they can talk confidently to you about web design without talking over your head, that’s a good sign. Don’t be afraid to reject volunteers if they’re unsuitable.

If you need a volunteer to help keep the site’s content up-to-date then techie skills are less important: look instead for someone with good grammar and spelling, fairly good basic computing skills, the ability to copy text accurately, and plenty of spare time on their hands.

The better organised you are, the more likely your volunteers are to do a good job for you. Always provide them with a short, clearly written project brief and state what standards you expect.

Get free advice

Web design is a constantly shifting area of technology and you may sometimes need advice. Many consultants and web professionals are happy to give some pro-bono advice, particularly if it can be done quickly. If your website isn’t getting many visitors, ask an expert in search engine optimisation to give an hour or two of their time to help you figure out what the reason and solution might be. If you don’t know which content management system to implement on your new website, find an expert to help you decide. It doesn’t hurt to ask and if they decline, thank them graciously for getting back to you. If they agree, ask for a short written report and remember to thank them.

Find a helpful geek

In the UK a charity called IT4Communities can help you find a suitable volunteer. I’d recommend you contact them rather than use your local Volunteer Centre because IT4Communities specialise in matching you with technically adept volunteers and will help you define your needs properly.  IT4Communities has a case studies section on their website, showcasing some of their successful volunteer projects. Some of these are web design projects and one of the case studies is about how, whilst living in Australia, I gave a website health check to The Theatre Royal Stratford East. In 2010 I worked three days a week for IT4Communities at their office near Barbican, London, so I can recommend their service to charities that need a volunteer.

You might also use Sparked, a website that enables you to get advice and sometimes practical support from volunteers online. It’s not all IT related, because as well as help with website development you could ask for help with logo design, copy writing and similar tasks. The kind of tasks that work well on Sparked tend to be quicker and simpler than those on iT4Communities.

What’s their motivation?

Volunteers need to get something out of the work they do for you: a sense of achievement, sharing skills, socialising. If they do a good job, send them a thank you letter, provide them with a reference or recommend their work to other charities.

School kids and university students are often given a project to create a simple website. They may decide to ‘help’ a charity by using them as their project. Remember, by definition a student is someone who hasn’t yet learned to do something, so why let them loose on your site? They almost certainly won’t be available to fix any problems afterwards.

Watch out for wannabe web designers who want to build up their portfolio by creating you a free website. An organisation I know once had a volunteer design their website. He became angry when they later altered the colour scheme because it no longer matched the picture in his portfolio. Volunteers should be doing the work primarily for your, not their own benefit. Also, very few beginning web designers can design standards-compliant websites.

Your volunteers won’t be around forever

Many are between jobs, retired, on holiday from university, employed part-time or on long-term sick leave and their situation may be subject to change with little notice. Therefore, don’t give long-term projects to volunteers unless the work could easily be taken on by someone else when they leave. Don’t give volunteers urgent work and tight deadlines, that’s unfair.

You’re in charge

If you’re not a very technically-minded person it can be tempting to leave everything in a volunteer’s hands, but this has its dangers. For example, I know a charity that fell out with their volunteer web designer, who then claimed copyright of their website, deleted it and changed the passwords. Ouch. When working with volunteers on websites, ensure that the charity has ownership of the domain name and the hosting account, retain all passwords, and make clear to the volunteer that you own copyright on any work they create for you. Ideally, put this in a simple, short contract that they sign. Try to communicate regularly with your volunteer about progress and any concerns you or they have.

TGV provided me with PSDs, visual designs created using Photoshop. These included mockups for the home page, blog, portfolio, contact us, and other pages, which had a consistent and eye-catching design. It was my job to turn these flat pictures into a working website. I’d like to share with you some of the techniques used to build the website …

How to make WordPress more flexible, and display information more consistently

The TGV website has very few static pages. Apart from a blog, its main feature is a collection of samples of their work, organised into collections according to discipline (branding, web design, exhibitions etc). For each of their clients, there’s a gallery of photos of work done for them.

Because this information needed to be ordered and presented consistently, I opted to use several features of WordPress that enable the creation of non-standard web content. You may have heard people say that WordPress isn’t a fully fledged content management system, that it’s just a blogging tool. Not true! The following three features enable you to create complex websites with information arranged however you want.

1. Custom Post Types :  create new types of content, not just the standard pages and posts. For example, TGV’s website has “work samples”. A literary website I’ve worked on has “authors” and “books” as custom post types. You get a new box on the WordPress dashboard, alongside “Posts”, “Pages”, “Links” etc where you can add and edit your new type of post.

2. Taxonomies :  organise multiple lists of terms to describe and categorise your content. For example, a book can be categorised by language, genre etc. On the TGV Design website taxonomies are used to organise their portfolio according to discipline, client and sector.

3. Custom Fields :  add new types of information to your posts. For example, a book might have publication date, publisher and author as custom fields.

I used WPMU DEV’s CustomPress plugin for WordPress. This plugin makes it easier to create custom post types, taxonomies and custom fields, and integrate them into your website templates, without having to write a lot of code from scratch.

Carousels

An important feature of the TGV Design website is its use of carousels (also called slideshows or sliders). There are lots of carousel plugins to choose from, but I found that only yCyclista could do exactly what was required. There’s a gallery feature built into in WordPress that lets you upload photos and associate them with any page. The yCyclista plugin takes this gallery of photos and turns it into a slideshow, with thumbnails below a large image. Some customisation and styling was required to get it looking right, but the plugin’s code made that easy to do.

Visit the TGV Design website at www.tgvdesign.co.uk. If you would like Jason to code your website using WordPress, please ask for a quote.

Their old website was also built using WordPress

It used the WP Remix theme framework and generally looked less impressive, didn’t reflect the CMG’s branding properly, and wasn’t quite as easy to edit and customise. See the image below:

The Striking premium WordPress theme

The Change Management Group also wanted me to install Striking which is a premium (meaning you pay $35) theme for WordPress.

The number of features included is excellent, more than most theme frameworks provide. It was easy to put extra columns on the home page, tidily list staff members with a thumbnail photo next to their details,  insert a map and so on.

There are definite advantages to using a premium theme to build a website: the client can visualise what they’re going to get; premium themes are usually better coded than free themes; and they cut down on the design and coding work required if the site was to be entirely custom built; so you can jump straight into customisation.

How I can help your organisation build its website

I can help you find a premium theme to suit your organisation’s branding, or develop one from scratch for you if necessary. I’ll install WordPress and get the theme working with your content. I’ll teach you how to keep your own website’s pages up-to-date, and maintain the site for you to keep it running reliably. Contact Jason King for a quote.

Visit The Change Management Group‘s new website.

The Ectopic Pregnancy raises awareness of ectopic pregnancies amongst women of childbearing age, the medical profession and the general public. Their website is a vital tool for providing information and enabling those affected by this medical condition to share their own experiences. The website underwent a complete redesign in 2010, changing its layout and visual style as well as how it’s updated. Staff at the Trust can easily update their own pages and publish news on the website using the WordPress content management system.

Online forums using phpBB

The intention in setting up a website was to provide quality medical information in a clear and friendly way and to enable a self-sustaining community to grow on an integral message board. The message board has been a great success with hundreds of new messages per day from women discussing their experiences of ectopic pregnancy and sharing information. The website uses the free and open source phpBB message board software to run the discussion forums. It can be configured (by editing its CSS stylesheet) to match the look and style of your own website. It also has full admin and moderating facilities and a thriving community of users who can help you get to grips with it.

eWellBeing award

In 2007 my website for the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust won an eWellBeing award. The site won the award for its use of forums to build an online community.

Visit this website at www.ectopic.org.

WordPress was the content management system preferred by the client. The main advantage of using WordPress for this website was to enable visitors to leave a comment and have all those messages appear on-screen for others to read. So far over 300 messages of support have been submitted via a form on the website and displayed on a page for the world to read.

The carousel (or slideshow) at the top of the home page automatically switches between the portraits and stories of four women who’ve experienced secondary breast cancer. This technique enables a website to pack content into a small but prominent area of the screen, and make good use of striking images.

Note the rounded corners on boxes. This is done with a CSS technique that doesn’t usually work in Internet Explorer – but I used some Javascript code called Curvy Corners to overcome this limitation.

» visit the Secondary Breast Cancer website.

I applied for a Google Grant for the Australian care organisation Baptcare and used it to create an advertising campagaign. Within a month we  doubled their website’s visitors and page views. Here are some tips on how you can do the same.

Baptcare’s web stats for the first 15 days of July were:

Visits: 1,229
Page views: 4,503

Compare those figures to the first 15 days of August (after the ad campaign went live):

Visits: 2,435
Page views: 9,184

To put these stats in context, the website might have expected a 5% and 10% rise in stats from one month to the next, but until now, never 50%.

Apply for a Google Grant

Do this as soon as possible, because you can wait anywhere between a fortnight and six months for a decision. For eligibility details and an application form, visit www.google.com/grants in the US, www.google.co.uk/grants if your charity is in the UK or www.google.com.au/grants in Australia.

Start off by creating lots of ads

I quickly set up dozens of ads for Baptcare: some performed well, some didn’t, but at least I could then weed out the poor ads and concentrate on tweaking the click-through-rates of the better ones. It’s important to check for spelling and stick to the charity’s style and marketing guidelines, although that’s a challenge when so few words can be used in an ad.

It’s the same story with keywords. Choose at least a dozen for each ad, then weed out the poor-performing keywords later. For an ad for Baptcare’s fostering programme, I initially chose about 20 keywords but when I checked the stats, only a few of those keywords (foster care, fostering, fostering children) were actually pulling in visitors, so we ditched the others.

Keep weeding and tweaking

AdWords give you detailed stats that show which ads and keywords do and don’t work. Weed out the ones that aren’t getting clicked on. Now start fine-tuning your remaining ads.

Trying setting up several ad variations for an advert. Each version might have very different or just slightly different wording. Google will randomly show one of your ad variations and you can use the stats to find out which one was clicked on the most. This is a great way to test which kind of language works best. For example:

Foster a Child in Need
Temporary carers sought for kids
unable to live at home.

Become A Foster Carer
For Children Unable To Live At Home
Find Out More Through Baptcare.

Advertise all your services

Don’t just advertise your organisation as a whole, or one or two services. Create ads for everything you do. The more your organisation does, the more you can advertise. Apparently most organisations use nowhere near the amount of free advertising that they’re allowed to use.

Baptcare is a huge nonprofit with services that include residential and community aged care, disability, children and families, asylum seeker accommodation, research and many other areas of work. It was easy to go through Baptcare’s website and pick a dozen separate services to advertise, each with a very different potential clientele and very different keyword choices. With websites of smaller organisations there seem to be less to work with but if you’re creative with your message, I’m sure you can find plenty to advertise.

Link ads to specific pages on your website

Don’t set up dozens of ads that all link back to your home page. If your ad is related to your latest donations appeal, link directly to the landing page for that appeal. The Baptcare website had big increases in visits to their fostering, residential aged care and vacancies sections because the ads linked to specific sections’ landing pages.

If your ad campaign doesn’t initially do all you’d hoped it would, stick with it. Try different keywords, try ad variations, create a lot of new ads. Keep experimenting. Google have started to check occasionally whether you’re actually using your Grant and benefiting from it, so make it a regular routine to check and tweak your adverts.

Hire me to run your charity’s Google Grants campaign

A Google Grant gives you free advertising but you still need to find staff time to manage it. Do you need help running an Adwords campaign to bring in more visitors and boost your website’s presence? I could manage your campaign for you, create your adverts, track the results and give you regular stats reports. Contact me for a quote – I would be happy to be paid entirely on results, so you know you’ll get your money’s worth!