The sorry state of charity websites
It's not difficult. I had some spare time recently (my employers ran out of money to pay me!) and I learnt web design. I didn't intend to do this, I only meant to add some content to a structure that a volunteer had already created for me.
In the end I started almost from scratch in order to ensure ease of use and editing, adherence to web standards, and accessibility. It only took me a month to create a website for Advocacy Action. This is W3C compliant. It is Hermish approved. It does use open licensing. All pages on it validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Standards compliance helps almost everyone, especially people with disabilities, but everyone else too. You can check any site for standards compliance very easily if you go to the official validation page and enter the URL from the address bar. The first thing that is needed is a DTD.
I am shocked at the number of advocacy project websites that don't have this simple basic beginning. To see what I mean, right click on any page and then choose 'View Source' from the menu. Right at the top you should see something like this:
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">If you have a website, check it, and sort it out - for the sake of the people you really want to read it.
If you want to learn how to do this yourself, learn CSS and read some articles at A List Apart, and other places like this, or here. Use colour resources like VisiBone's Color Lab. Dive into Accessibility or use the RNIB's resources.
And keep your site up to date. Create relevant links to other advocacy projects. Share links (the best way of making your site easy to find is to have links from other sites). Be part of the community.
Email me if you want any more info.: blogger[@]visctrix[.]net
3 comments:
NOT A HAPPY VOLUNTEER
Hi Henry, it's Mark the unhappy vulunteer you have ungratefully made to sound like an incompetent ass! Is this a deliberatly implied insult or were you tired when you wrote this blog entry?
PS - :(
Ha ha! I'm glad for that cheeky little smiley there. And that we ended up laughing about this last night.
Credit where credit's due. You spent months working freely on the Advocacy Action website, often waiting in vain for me to provide you with content, patiently changing small elemnts of design to meet my exacting requirements, and researching and putting into practice standards compliance, accessibility statements, etc.
I absolutely credit you with all that background work. In fact it was probably my fault, with all these design tweaks I insisted on, that when I came to insert the text into the pages I found the nested tables hard to navigate and format.
I got halfway through, and as I was trying to learn all this formatting html I kept on coming across cascading style sheets (CSS) and their promise of simpler formatting, smaller file sizes, etc.
Without all your work it would have taken longer for many of the things on the new site, but at the end of the day I took a linux-based text-editor, learnt html and CSS, and put the site together in a month. The point I carelessly made was that these basic programming skills are quick to pick up for many people who might want to create a website.
Of course you also need to be properly credited for the excellent RASA website as well as the Advocacy Action logo design, the original website which was public for many months, the old Advocacy Action Forum (now deleted), the RASA blog, for cheering up the lives of some lonely hospital patients, and generally caring.
Thank you
PS ;-)
Shucks, stop it now, you've made me go shy... Mark
PS - :)
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