using wordpress to power your non-profit website

Using WordPress to power your non-profit websitePresentation by Jason King at Making Links 2008

You shouldn’t have to rely on a web designer to make content changes

Nor do you need to learn web design

Take control of your own website

WordPress started out as a very good blogging tool…

• Posts

• Ordered by date

• Archived by month and year

• Organised by category

• Performs well in search engines e.g. Google

• RSS feed

…and evolved into a capable content management system

• Pages can be structured in a hierarchy

• Plugins add new functionality

• Customisable themes and templates

• Built using popular technologies

• Categorisation of content

• Upload documents as well as images

Why is WordPress a good CMS choice for a non-profit?

It’s free

It’s open source

It’s built on popular, tried and tested technologies

It’s evolving.

New versions are published regularly, bringing improvements to functionality and ease of use

Simplicity. Anyone can use it

Documentation is better than many other open source CMS

It’s very popular

The WordPress forums have an active community of users

WordPress is very flexible.

Take a look at these non-profit organisations’ websites to see how different they are in content, layout and design…

Children’s Rights

Too Young to Work

Greek Care

Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust

What can you do in WordPress?• Publish your news immediately

• Or schedule your announcements

• Create and rearrange pages

• Maintain a links page

• Categorise your pages, posts and links

• Publish a photo gallery

Just for practice, you could get a free account with www.wordpress.com

Host WordPress on your webspace

• Download from www.wordpress.org and upload files by FTP.

• Your hosting provider must offer PHP and MySQL technologies.

• Some web hosting comes with one-click installation of WordPress (but check you’re getting the latest version)

The famous “five minute installation”

Despite the WordPress boast, installation takes more like an hour (halve that if you’ve done it before). But that’s still pretty quick!

If you’re not confident, pay someone or get a volunteer to install WordPress for you

You’ll need to install upgrades

•WordPress is regularly improved, made more secure and new features added.

•So upgrade several times a year.

•Plugins also have to be upgraded but that’s a quicker, one-click task.

Get a new look with a new theme

Download a free or paid-for theme

• Do you want a theme for a blog?

• Or a CMS type theme?

• Or a magazine style theme?

• Download free themes from http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

• You can also buy themes

Design your own theme

• If you can write semantic, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS… then you can learn to create a WordPress theme

• There are lessons in the Codex

• There are many tutorials on the web

• Get help from the WordPress forums

The motto of

WordPress is that: Code is

Poetry

<p>The motto of <cite>

WordPress </cite>

is that: </p>

<blockquote> Code is Poetry </blockquote>

Hire a WordPress designer

•Make sure your web designer has had WordPress experience

•They should be able to create a theme from scratch, not just take the default Kubrick theme and change the header graphic

You get what you pay for

Want more functionality?

A few plugins that make WordPress a better CMS

• Search Everything - pages can be searched

• SEM Search Reoaded - better search results

• Breadcrumbs Nav XT - breadcrumb navigation

• Dagon Design SiteMap - adds a sitemap

• cForms - insert forms

Resources

• www.wordpress.org

• www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/15/wordpress-developers-toolbox

• www.wordcamp.com.au

WordCamp Australia

WordPress for Dummies

Alternatives to WordPress

• Blogger (if all you want is a blog)• Joomla (popular CMS, well supported)• Drupal (very complex, very flexible

CMS)• Adobe Contribute (software for

directly editing HTML on an existing static website)

• Many, many others!

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