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.
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. That said there are many positive things you can do to improve your website even with restrictive funds.
It’s a common scenario - your charity website is outdated and not functioning well.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. This article is aimed at owners of websites built in either Drupal or WordPress, although some more general points can be applied to sites using other technologies. This is an extensive subject but in this short space I’m just going to try and cover the key points.
Sometimes, it pays to go back to basics and rethink fundamental assumptions. While the terms ‘content managed website’, ‘content management’, ‘content management system' and 'CMS' are commonly used, I think different technologies, approaches and implementations of the CMS makes this a very tricky concept to pin down.
In a previous post, I covered some useful (and less well known) modules to help you with importing content into your new Drupal 8 or Drupal 9 website. In this post, I want to cover moving content the opposite way - from Drupal into WordPress. I also touch on more generic content importing from other content management systems.
While the Drupal core's Migrate functionality is often the go-to starting point for imports and is well covered, I'm focusing in this article on some of the other approaches and modules that might help your migrations.
Many organisations, especially those in the charity sector who may feel their values align with those of the open source community, will most likely run internal or desktop systems based on closed source software from the established vendors like Microsoft. Given the skillset of internal IT teams and the massive market dominance of these solutions, this is not surprising. So far, open source solutions based on Linux have struggled to find anything more than a foothold in this area.
Websites are always evolving. We build new websites and software tools and are constantly improving existing ones in response to changing needs and new opportunities. How are Covid lockdown restrictions affecting our work?
Option 1 - stay with the technology platform you have and rebuild.
This option is definitely the easiest provided you are happy with your current digital partners and hosting and support service. If your admin experience is fine and your support agency are helpful and responsive, your best option will be to rethink your audience, your priorities and goals and redesign your site. You’ll have no need to retrain and get used to a new CMS plus you can keep your data where it is which is a huge attraction.
If you are seeking a new digital partner for your charity's website, or are looking to improve the way your site is hosted and supported, the following guidance should help.
Sereno Charity Websites & Intranets
Sereno builds bespoke websites & intranets for charities in Drupal & WordPress.
