John began his career developing e-learning and expert systems before moving into business application and web development. He co-founded Sereno with Rod fifteen years ago. John concentrates on developing digital strategies with Sereno's charity partners and leads on design.
Several years ago, Drupal 6 and 7 could probably have been considered the 'best' content management systems available. Of course, by 'best' I am being subjective here and I would have chosen Drupal over Wordpress, Joomla etc because of rigorous code standards, structured yet flexible building tools, configurable administration experience and so on.
If you are planning to rebuild your charity’s website, you are presented with a wide range of technology choices. This can seem bewildering but in point of fact I think you can make your choice by ansering a few simple questions and employing a couple of rules of thumb:
For many years, our go to learning management system (LMS) has been Moodle. Tried and tested, open source and more or less industry standard in the further education and not for profit sectors, Moodle is a sound platform with which to deliver your online learning.
A vital part of looking after your website involves an ongoing analysis of how well it is performing. I think most communications professionals these days spend some time every month looking at the stats. These are often used in reporting to senior management teams. They answer questions such as - how well is our site doing?
Anyone can install a Wordpress site - it’s that easy. However, not anyone can build a Wordpress site in such a way that makes it easy for site editors to control and extend their website effectively.
Many charities would like to integrate donations & newsletters into their websites. Alongside this, forms integrations can help streamline the process of transferring data between, say, an individual's donation and a record in a CRM.
We have been building sites both in Drupal and Wordpress for many years. That said, Drupal was our ‘go to’ platform. It provided a much greater level of structure both in terms of modelling data requirements and building code. Wordpress was ideal for smaller projects where a restricted budget and speed of development were key.
While well-crafted copy and clarity of messaging are key to your website’s success, it’s true to say that your site can be massively altered by your choice of images. Larger charities or social enterprises may have sizeable budgets for photography (and video) but many smaller charities don’t have this luxury.
It’s a common scenario - your charity website is outdated and not functioning well. However, a rebuild seems like a huge undertaking right now. You have so many issues to deal with, not least how to adapt to the pandemic that developing a new website seems a step too far.
Your search engine strategy (SEO) - the steps you take to make sure your website performs at its best on Google and other search engines - is a key element of your digital strategy. In this article, I want to run through some simple steps you can take to help your site’s SEO.
