Recently I’ve worked on several community based web sites. Here I’ll discuss the lessons learned and also describe some of the considerations in building one. Its mostly common sense.

By ‘Voluntary Organisations’ I mean groups in the UK who operate on a not for profit basis. Typically they are small bodies with a handful of permanent staff or volunteers and have very specific remits. Their funding comes from charities, local government and often the National Lottery. They don’t have IT departments and may not have any staff who have been involved in making a web site before.

The logos below are links to the sites that I’ve made for this kind of organisation.

Nominate somebody with time

At the risk of stating the obvious, there should be somebody within the organisation who has the time and motivation to work with the provider for a few hours a week over five or six weeks. Without this person nothing can happen. Even after a successful launch the web site will need updating by somebody from within. If you are all too busy then its best to wait before starting. This person does not need to be technical, they just need to be clear about what they want to achieve.

Be clear about the purpose of the web site

Reasons for having a web site might include
- to answer common questions that you might otherwise have to reply to personally
- to publicise events and promotions
- to engage with people who use your services
- to encourage clients to help each other in forums
- to publicise new services
- to provide a brochure
- to please a sponsor

If you can’t think of a reason to have a web site you probably don’t need one.

Content, content, content

If you get the division of labour right between the IT people and yourself, it’ll become clear that the technology is not the hardest part. Finding and updating useful content is the biggest challenge. CA Plus and Broxtowe Youth Homelessness were already clear about what they wanted to say before their web site began. (”Don’t leave home, come and talk to us and we’ll help” and “We provide accounting and payroll advice, here it is”).

Give something away

This sounds blindingly obvious, if you offer people something useful, they will keep visiting your site and stay in touch. If you just use it as a brochure then visitors will probably read it once and not return.
Think about the sites you go to regularly, news papers, supermarkets, banks, Ebay, Amazon, they all offer something that you want.
On the Friends of Sharphill web site we’ve got a bird song quiz which is popular with school children.

Keep in touch with newsletters

Its a good idea to offer visitors the option of signing up for a regular email newsletter. Its important to make it easy for them to unsubscribe though. The email could contain brief descriptions of recent content on the web site and link the articles.

CA Plus did this and its been a run away success; over 500 people have asked to receive payroll and accounting news. But this only works because of the usefulness of the information provided.

Broxtowe Youth Homelessness commissioned a film maker to produce a series of short films aimed at teenagers. These are hosted at Vimeo and we provided links to them from the web site. The young people tell some quite sobering stories in these films.

Use forums for staff and volunteers to have ideas

Content Management Systems (discussed below) usually provide discussion forums. These are a good alternative to circular email exchanges because more people can be included and because they are archived for future use.
Encourage staff and volunteers to use forums to discuss new ideas about how the group could function better.
Forums can be open to the public or restricted to a set of registered members. Public forums usually need a moderator !
They can be used to let the public help each other by pooling experiences.

Invite readers to contribute

Some visitors to the web site may be able to write copy for it. The more the better ! Let people comment on articles, they may well be able to help each other.

Search engine optimisation

Unless you are in a very competitive market, its likely people will be able to find you on google. Especially if you are consistent and honest about the content of your pages. The title should match the content. SEO is more useful for sites that are trying to bend the rules.

Google Documents

I am going to risk sounding like a Google Salesman here, but they have some very helpful, very free, very groovy stuff for organisations to use. Google docs provides a way to write Word and (simple) Excel documents on line and share them with other people. You can do all this in a web browser. Google provide useful templates for common kinds of document and you can even download them to your PC to work on them in your office.
There is a chatty video about Google Docs here.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a useful way to publicise events.

Google Maps

Use Google Maps to give directions to your office or places where outdoor activities will take place.

Google Analytics

The last of these four tools is Google Analytics. Again its free and very useful because it counts visitors to your web site, records what part of the world they come from, how they found your site and what they looked at. Its a great way to tell how much your site is being used.

The next section provides some practical guidance about getting making a new web site for a voluntary organisation.

How we built these sites

Here are some of the practical details of how to quickly and cheaply build a web site for a charity or voluntary organisation. I’ve chosen Drupal as the example CMS but others would be fine.

Static versus Content Managed Systems

Ten years ago web sites were written page by page in much the same way that Word documents are. But that often mixed up technical stuff like HTML and CSS with the content. Today you are much more likely to be using a Content Management System. There are hundreds of these to choose from although the majority of sites are based on Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. You can find comparisons of these systems on the web but briefly; Wordpress started off as a blogging tool. Its fun to use but is not really suited to writing full blown business web sites. Joomla is a business orientated CMS which has tended to produce good looking sites and Drupal is perhaps the most popular, although its more technical and until recently has produced rather plain looking web sites.
CMSs make life easy for the end user, but they are need somebody with some spare time to set up.

Finding a developer

In truth I have never had to do this ! But assuming you have chosen to use Drupal, do some google searches for Drupal developers.
How to tell the good from the bad ? Look at example sites. You can probably judge from their web site how much money they each spend on marketing. Tell the potential provider what your budget is and invite them to break down their costs. This will save a lot of time on both sides and in many cases the provider may decide not to bid for the work.
Ask for

• References
• How will you both track issues ?
• Can you have a simplified administration account ?
• Backup procedure
• Cost of follow up work
• Annual hosting costs
• Can they transfer yor web site URL without changing the email server ?

Ensure a proper division of labour

The developer should ask you what features you need, for instance news letters, polls, google maps, forums (moderated? members only?). Normally contact pages and search will be automatically included. This will help her to choose from a wide range of possible Drupal modules.

Work on the site as it is built

You should be able to view and edit the site from a very early stage. This is a great way for you to spot problems and misunderstandings early on. The prototype site can use a different URL to the final version.

Use ready made graphics templates

Happily there are now an increasing number of ready made templates available for the major CMSs. A respectable one costs about £60 but it can save hundreds of pounds of work by a graphic designer. You can also also find pictures on flickr to replace the template images. There, that’s saved you £1500 already.
Have you got a logo to use on the banner ? If not you could consider hiring a designer to create one for use on the web site and on your business cards and email footers. Expect to pay about £200 unless you already know somebody who can use Photoshop with flare.

Some templates now offer a magazine type format, these are good for putting news on the fron page but you will still need to provide menus to access older content.

Once the developer knows what features you want and which template to use, she can go away and set up a skeleton site. You could ask for this to be password protected until launch.

Users

Its easy to set up a membership scheme so that members can view content not available to the public. You could charge for this, although in practice its a pain to administer. Anyway, by leaving all content open to the public you are more likely to draw people to use your services.

Contact pages

Visitors may want to contact you about a number of different things. As well as the site wide contact form, consider using others that will automatically email you with their comments.

Make sure that the site will be searchable

A lot of visitors will reach your site through google searches, so describe articles with tags. Use meaningful URLs.

Dive in

The developer will set up a special user name and password for your staff to start adding content. Dive in and you’ll find a screen like the one pictured below (TINY MCE) that makes it easy for you to add bullet lists, pictures, links and headings. As soon as you save an article it’ll be published.

Content and menu structure

You know best how to structure your site. I love the ideas in “Don’t Make me Think“. It is usually possible to structure the site so that visitors don’t even need to think when looking for material. Its worth emphasising again that a search box should be on each page !

Train two members of your staff to add content to the web site. Then if one goes on holiday you can still keep it up to date.

Backups

To back up the site you will need an archive of the files on the server together with a dump of the contents from the database. While you might not be able to reconstitute the site from these things, a Drupal developer will be able to help. Have these emailed to you regularly and save them.

Ask a stranger to try it out

Usability testing. Asking one person to try out your new web site is 100% better than not asking anybody. Set them a task like “Can you find anything about new National Insurance rates for 2010″ or “Can you get to the section about Criminal Records Bureau checks”. Watch to see if they get stuck.

Launch

If you don’t already have a URL then your developer can easily get you one. They should register it in your name and not anybody else’s !
But if you already have a URL then dig out an old invoice from the ISP and ask your developer to contact them to arrange a transfer. You can leave your email server in place and just ask for the ‘A’ record to be altered to point to the new Drupal server. This usually takes a couple of days but its best to start the process weeks before the launch, just in case !
I am assuming that you are a small organisation and will not be overwhelmed with visitors on your first day. If you expect more than a few thousand then make sure your developer has done some load testing.

After launch

Remember to keep updating the pictures and articles on your site. The process needs to be part of the organisations routine.

Other tools

Skype offer a free Internet Telephone service as long as both parties are using Skype. The quality can be variable, but its free.

Basecamp is a free tool for coordinating the activities of several people on a small project.

Dropbox provides an online store for documents.

Conclusion

Mostly its just common sense. The two key factors are to think about what people would like to read on your site and about how you and the developer can divide your labour in the most efficient way possible.