Help Needed With Charity Website Design

J

JustinT

New member
Jun 10, 2010
2
0
0
London
www.coreuk.org
Hi Everyone

My name is Justin and I’m extremely impressed with this forum! There’s a wealth of information and some very smart people on this forum.

I am part of a registered charity called CORE (City Outreach & Empowerment). We work with homeless people and prostitutes living in London. We give them warm clothing, sleeping bags, food, drink and (perhaps most importantly) information about their entitlements and places where they can get help. We also have some limited housing in East London where we take people off the streets and help them to rebuild their lives.

My experience with website design, however, is very limited and I would love to learn this skill to improve CORE's website so that we can get our message out. Also, very tragically, we lost some potential corporate support last weekend because our website was simply not up to standard.

Are there any suggestions on what we could do to improve our website? You'll notice that we don't even have a page for donations.. how do most people make these?

Please visit our website if you get the chance and we would appreciate any comments, criticism or feedback.

www.CoreUK.org

Thank you so much for reading!
Justin
 


For starters, your banner is WAAAY too big. I have to literally let my eyes drop 3/4 the way across the screen before I hit real content. That's bad by the way.

You're using Joomla. Easiest solution: get another theme. Keep the top international charity/non profit organization websites open in other tabs and go through the free themes that look somewhat similar. Just copy other organizations, there's no point being all unique and shit with a charity website. You just want the information to be easily accessible for whomever would want it, whether it be corporate sponsors or volunteers looking to help. (Maybe homeless people surfing from the library? you never know)

As for the donations. I'm sure Joomla has a module for it. Altho personally I only have experience with drupal, so maybe they might not. I'm pretty sure paypal has a donate button as well that you can just integrate into your website with a few copy/pastes.

Anyways, good luck brah.
 
Agreed on the massive banner. It doesn't feel much like a charity either. Why not swap that around for smiling and greatful (but dirty) faces of the people the charity helps. Or something to include a human touch.

The blue and the skyline feels more like an architect firm than a humane charity. I don't know if you have a budget for a photo, but there's lots of ways to convey sharing and charity for the underprivileged.

Maybe old, dirty hands holding a pristine white steaming cup of tea. Anyway, it's something to think on.

Also on the first page, the actual content is not going to get read. It's too much work. I agree that the idea of sharpie marker on cardboard is a good design idea, but I'm not going to spend ten minutes squinting at a screen for something that I could whip through in 30 seconds were it in Arial.

I'd actually change the front page, and drop the main content you already have. I assume there are two visitors to your site: the donors and the people in need. So why not have two big buttons: "Get help" and "Give help" which funnel the user towards either donating or getting aid.
 
I have not seen your site, but if you are really making use of Joomla, get rid of it as you can do much better than that
 
The "letter" on the front page has an annoying to read font. I could only skim it.

Also, agreed on huge-banner-wtf.
 
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