7 Awesome Examples Of The Best Non-Profit And Charity Websites

7 Awesome Examples Of The Best Non-Profit And Charity Websites

The vast majority of websites that web designers create are built for business and commercial enterprises whose main objective is generating profits. However, not every website is designed to enhance a company’s P&L sheet, and that is because some websites are built for charities and non-profit organisations.

A quick caveat to the term ‘non-profit’ is that whilst these websites do not generate dividends for shareholders as commercial websites do, that is not to say that a charity or non-profit website does not generate revenue. In fact, many of these websites have been so well-designed that they generate huge amounts of much-needed income for the charity in question.

All told there must be hundreds of thousands of websites built for charities and non-profit organisations and to give you an insight into how successful they are, we are going to highlight seven of the best that is all credit to the web designers who designed and built them. As such we will also point out some of these websites’ best web design features.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF) –  https://www.worldwildlife.org

Known for its work in conservation, protecting the environment, and the welfare of animals across the world.

  • Lots of informative content throughout
  • Call to Action buttons for “Donate” and “Adopt” are prominent
  • The uncluttered layout on the home page
  • Excellent use of images
  • The top menu and subsequent navigation are easy to follow
5 Web Design Elements That Your Website Will Benefit From Not Having

5 Web Design Elements That Your Website Will Benefit From Not Having

Much of what you read about web design and much of the advice from a web design agency will be about what it must include. This is understandable given the many goals that a website has to achieve and also that in trying to rank a website you have to take account of dozens of the ranking factors that Google has.

What you might not hear so much about are the web design elements that should be avoided. Many are outdated, diminish the appearance of your website, and most important of all, annoy visitors. If your website does that, not only are visitors lost forever but worse than that, visitors leaving quickly is one of the ways your ranking on Google is harmed.

So, whilst there are several web design elements to avoid, we thought we would keep to just five, given that these five are the ones which we see most often. That is bad news for the businesses that own those websites, but the good news is avoiding them means you will gain an advantage over those website owners who insist on keeping them.

SEO Ranking Factors

Top 3 Most Overlooked SEO Ranking Factors

SEO for law firms and lawyers in Perth can be difficult. Lawyers Perth is a competitive keyword, and every firm wants to get the top organic rankings for this and related keywords that are most relevant to their services. However, not all law firms approach SEO the right way. There are a lot of things that are overlooked – either through a lack of understanding of the intricacies of SEO or through pure laziness – and these can have huge negative impacts on your organic rankings.

SEO Perth provide a few simple actions that can address these overlooked ranking factors, leading to huge boosts in your firm’s organic rankings. With this in mind, I’ve put together a list of a few of the most overlooked SEO ranking factors:

  1. Landing Page Optimisation

Although you may not have realised it, Google actually takes your website’s bounce rate into account. This means that it’s very important to have a high quality landing page which encourages people to hang around and browse further.

Google notices when people leave your site quickly after clicking on an organic search engine result. If people start consistently leaving quickly, your rank will drop. Make sure that every page is relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank them for, and make sure that they address the questions that people are going to be searching for.

  1. Negative Backlinks

Everyone realises the importance of high quality backlinks for SEO (If you don’t, go and learn it). However, not everyone realises that negative backlinks are also a possibility, and that they can have significant impacts on your ability to rank. Basically, negative backlinks are links to your website from spam or low-credibility sites. They reduce your site’s credibility.

Luckily, it’s actually relatively simple to get rid of negative backlinks. Simple head over to your Google search console home page, click on search traffic and open the ‘links to your site’ tab. Here you will find a list of all the websites linking back to you. You can disavow any low quality or spammy websites if you want, preventing them from hurting your ranking.

Branding Tips

5 Branding Tips For New Businesses

New businesses can sometimes underestimate the importance of getting a clear, concise brand established. Branding allows you to define who you are and what your business’s aims are. Unfortunately, the chances of a new business succeeding without effective branding are low. Below are five tips designed to help new businesses achieve ultimate branding success:

  1. Make sure that your website is up to standard:

Nothing hurts the reputation of a new business more than a poor-quality website which has obviously been developed by an amateur. If you are serious about growing a successful business, then make sure that you use a professional web developed to build a website that stands out from your competitor’s. Doing this will help you present a strong and well-defined brand image which you can build on using other methods.

Branding

Branding Your Business Effectively

Do you ever look at your competitors and wonder why they get more attention and publicity than your business? There may be many reasons but one above all is most likely and that is they have better branding than you do.

Branding allows businesses, organisations and even individuals to portray a certain image or perception in the minds of customers and fans which they hope will be a positive one. From a business perspective, you want that positive image to immediately come to the forefront of a customer’s thoughts whenever they are thinking about the product or service you sell.

When you think of fast food restaurants, McDonald’s or KFC might come to mind immediately. With cars, it might be Ford or Volkswagen. For sports gear, it might be Nike or Under Armour. In these examples people who have never even bought products from any of these companies, know about them because of their very effective branding.

Web Design Guidelines

Basic Web Design Guidelines You Must Follow

Whether you outsource your web design, have it done in-house or even do it yourself in all cases you must follow a number of basic guidelines if you want your website to perform as you want it to. All of them can be achieved, especially if you and your web design team agree on them beforehand.

The first step must always be to plan your website in advance, both in terms of what it needs to do when completed and how it will look. As with any project, failing to plan is a recipe for disaster, and will undoubtedly lead to a lot of wasted time and money.

When considering the design of your website, unless there is a specific reason to make the layout complicated, always seek to make it simple, and user-friendly. Consistency throughout the site will help visitors find their way to each section or page quickly and without hindrance.

Ensure that your branding is clear throughout the site with the use of consistent colours and have your company logo clearly visible on the home page at least and preferably on every page.

When adding content to the site be conscious of the length of text lines and how they will appear on computer screens. The best practice is to use text tables to keep the text within pre-set widths.

Another way to make reading the content on your site easier is to keep blocks of text to single paragraphs. Seeing any more than four or five lines of text can put visitors off reading anything which is hardly going to help if the text relays an important message.

Images can be a double-edged sword to a website so careful consideration of their use is essential. There’s no denying that clear, sharp images can really help to engage visitors who are looking at them, and often they garner as much information from an image than they do text.

On the other side of the coin is the effect large image files have on website load times. Huge files can delay a web pages loading and even if that is for only a second, it might be enough for that visitor to click away.

Design Tweaks to Level Up Your Website

Design Tweaks to Level Up Your Website

If you work in real estate or interior design, then part of your job is to keep up with the latest trends and preferences of customers. In the same vein, doctors and nurses have to continually keep up with new information and developments.

Web design is no different. Tactics and norms go in and out of fashion, and sometimes, change completely. But for someone who owns and operates a business, they aren’t likely to keep up with these trends.

So we’ve collected a few important ones right here. If you apply them in a new or website redesign, your website should be ‘levelled up’ compared to where it started.

Negative and Clean Space

If you get a chance to in to a newsagent and pick up two magazines. One should be low priced, perhaps a ‘gossip’ or ‘weekly’ style magazine. The other should be a higher end, monthly magazine, around $15 per issue. Contrast the layouts of the two.

The more expensive, premium product will use much more white space, cleaner layouts and leave deliberate gaps and not cram every spare inch of space with content or advertising.

Adwords Marketing

The Advantages Of Using Adwords Marketing

According to digital marketing agency Slinky, using Google Adwords marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic a website and the advantages it gives to businesses who use it can often mean the difference between being profitable or running at a loss.

Adwords allows businesses to narrowly target certain search terms which they know potential clients and customers are likely to enter in Google’s search box. Depending on whether a business is looking for prospects or people ready to buy right away it can set up its Adwords campaign with keywords which are most applicable.

Examples of keywords or keywords phrases that could be used when looking for buyers are ‘cheapest’, ‘where can I buy’, or ‘best value’. These would have the product or service appended so if the company was selling fishing reels the complete keyword phrases would be ‘cheapest fishing reels’, ‘where can I buy fishing reels’ and ‘best value fishing reels’.

Keywords

Everything You Need To Know About Keywords And Their Uses

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is possibly the most important thing to think about when you are building or maintaining a website. It controls how search engines view your website, and is therefore important to help you achieve good search engine page rankings.

SEO can be split into two main parts; on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The most important aspect of on-page SEO is keyword use. Keywords are what search engines like Google and Bing look for when they are reading your page. They are the terms which people can search for in order to find your page. Clever use of relevant keywords can dramatically boost your sites visibility, and you will therefore find yourself with a lot more visitors!

Getting Most Out of SEO Budget

5 tips for getting the most out of your SEO budget

If you have a limited SEO budget, you need to think carefully about how you use it to make sure that you’re getting the best return on investment possible. Luckily, there are a few things that you can do to boost the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.

However, I understand that most SEO beginners won’t always be aware of these things. If you don’t have a lot of experience in the field, I’d recommend using a professional digital marketing agency, such as SEO Perth, who really knows what they’re doing and knows the latest SEO trends.

But, if you don’t want to use a professional, here’s a list of my top five tips for getting the most out of your SEO budget:

  1. Focus On Organic SEO

By this, I mean that you should focus on creating high quality content for your website that is well written and which addresses a particular user concern.

Make sure that you do some keyword research – there are plenty of free tools for SEO research out there – and focus on low competition keywords and phrases that will be easier to rank with.

Keyword Research

Why You Should Never Rush Your Keyword Research?

Keyword research is one of the most important components of search engine optimisation, or SEO as it is often known according to a report out this week by renowned SEO expert Peter Brittain. Effective keyword research allows you to identify the best terms for you to focus on when creating content to drive more visitors to your website.

As the internet has grown into a more competitive space, it is becoming harder and harder to rank highly in search engine results. Different people use different techniques to improve their SEO score, and therefore to jump up the search engine results pages. However, one of the most popular and most effective techniques is the strategic placement of various keywords – which are relevant to your business – throughout your website.

Unfortunately, a lot of people rush their keyword research, and this can lead to a wide range of mistakes. Some of the most common mistakes people make when they don’t spend enough time on their keyword research include:

SEO Rating

5 Simple Steps You Can Take To Improve Your Sites SEO Rating

Most people concerned with website design and writing web content should already have some understanding of at least basic search engine optimisation (SEO) practices. Unfortunately, many people believe that simple things like putting the right keywords in and making sure that their headings are tagged is enough to get their site to rank highly. When it doesn’t appear on the first few pages for any major keywords, they wonder what they are doing wrong.

Below are five simple actions that you can take to make sure that your website is ranked as highly as possible in search engine results:

  1. Run a SEO audit:

If you aren’t really sure about the SEO status of your website, then it can be a good idea to employ a professional analyst to run a SEO audit for you. If you get someone who is good at what they do, they should be able to deliver a comprehensive report on ways you can improve your website’s ranking.

SEM or SMM

Social Media Marketing vs Search Engine Marketing

Digital marketing is an extremely widespread practice, and it is growing every single day. People across the world use various digital marketing practices to advertise their products or services, often to great effect. Digital marketing is generally affordable, simple, and has the ability to reach a very large audience.

Two of the most popular types of digital marketing are social media marketing (SMM) and search engine marketing (SEM). Both have their benefits, and both have their negative aspects. Although different people will use different advertising mediums according to their aims, an ideal marketing campaign will include both SEM and SMM. Below is a brief comparison listing some of the pros and cons of each:

Search Engine Marketing:

SEM involves the use of ads targeted to certain keywords and placed at the top of search engine search pages. It is a very good way to drive people interested in a certain topic (of your choice) to your website, especially if you are trying to sell particular products or services.

Digital Marketing Agency

What A Digital Marketing Agency Can Do To Make Your Adwords Campaigns Profitable

If you have read anything online about the terrible experiences some entrepreneurs have had using Google Adwords then you may be forgiven for thinking it is something to avoid. In truth, it is a very effective way to advertise your business, but only if you know what you are doing to start with. For this reason, it makes absolute sense to seek out the services of a digital agency to help you setup your first Adwords campaign.

As with any agency or contractor, you must first ensure that they have a checkable track record and that their reputation is a good one. If they are such an agency, they will have no issue with letting you speak to one or two of their previous clients to get feedback on their experience with them.

Once you are satisfied that they are the right digital agency, you need to clarify with them what you want to achieve with your Adwords campaign. This will normally be to create sales but this is not always the case. Depending on your business model, it could be that you want to run a campaign to get leads instead. The campaign set up will depend on which of these it is, so the objectives need to be crystal clear from the start.

Eye-Catching Website

Designing An Eye-Catching Website – What Not To Do

Web design can be fun. Web design can be rewarding. Most importantly, designing a website can give your business an extremely effective online presence – if done right.

It is important to note that if you are trying to design your own business website, you have to do it right. You want it to be eye-catching, engaging, and interesting for everyone who visits it. What you don’t want is a confusing interface which makes it hard for people to get the most out of your site. If you do, you will lose customers, your reputation will suffer, and it really won’t be worth having a website at all.

With this in mind, you need to avoid the following common mistakes – at all costs – when designing your own website:

Effective Email

How Do I Know What To Include In An Effective Email?

Email marketing is a very useful tool for online businesses, but only when it is done right. If done in the wrong manner, you will drive potential clients away. It is therefore very important – as a small online business owner – to known and understand what makes an effective marketing email, and how to write one.

Getting started:

Many companies use fancy email formats and pay big dollars to get ‘professionals’ to write their marketing emails for them. Fortunately for you, you don’t actually need to do anything more than write a few paragraphs of content and press send.

The first thing that you need to do is identify the topic of your email. Failing to do this will set you up for failure immediately. Identifying an email topic will help you decide what you are going to focus on, and will help you decide on the right content for your message.

Cheap Web Hosting

Problems With Cheap Web Hosting

Many different levels of Slinky Hosting providers can be found across the internet. Unfortunately, many people fall into their traps every single day, and they often suffer because of it. Although not all cheap hosting providers are bad, a very large proportion of them are.

Using cheap providers can lead to a range of problems associated with poor customer service and the use of overcrowded or low-quality servers. Our top five problems associated with the use of cheap hosting include:

  1. Your website experiences regular downtime:

Unfortunately, many cheap web hosting providers are able to provide such cheap service because they cram way too many websites onto a single server. This can cause the server to become overloaded, and may mean that crashes regularly. If your site is offline often, people will stop visiting it. This will reduce your traffic volume, and may make it hard for you to make a profit.

  1. You have trouble with slow load speeds:

Slow load speeds are another problem which is frequently associated with overloaded servers. If there are any number of large websites on the same server as yours, they may hog the server’s resources. This can mean that your site takes a long time to load reducing the chances of people hanging around to see what you have to offer.

eCommerce Store

Starting Your Own eCommerce Store

You may have thought about starting some sort of online business in the past, but never really got past the thought stage. However, perhaps now you have decided that it’s really time to get into the online world, and have decided to open your own eCommerce store. But what do you do next?

This is a question which stumps would-be entrepreneurs all over the world. It is the question which stops many people from realising their dreams and developing their own online marketplace. Luckily for you, this article will go through some basic steps which will help you start your own eCommerce store.

Find your product:

Finding the right product to sell can be difficult. You might decide to open an eCommerce store which focuses on existing products, but which represents them in a novel way. Alternatively, you might have your own products in development, and are planning to sell them. Whatever the case, deciding what products you are going to sell is undoubtedly the most important thing, and should be done before you even consider developing your eCommerce store.

Web Design

Outsourcing Your Web Design The Right Way

Unless you have the time, the skills and undoubtedly the patience to build your businesses website on your own it is likely you will need to outsource your web design to someone who has.

There are many ways to do this and often someone you know will tell you they have a friend or relative who ‘builds websites‘. There are a couple of problems of going down this route however. The first is that the term ‘website’ covers such a wide range of possibilities that what will be regarded as a website to one person might only be a simple landing page to another.

The other issue with the ‘someone who knows someone’ scenario is there is often no opportunity to establish a proper business agreement in terms of the required quality, timescale, and fees.  If you wish to use people who are recommended to you this way establish that it will be a formal business arrangement and ensure beforehand that they are able to create the sort and size of website you want for your business.

Developing An Ad

Developing An Ad Which Will Go Viral

Advertising and ad development has never been more important to the online space than it is today. An effective ad campaign designed by a professional digital agency can be the difference between social media success and failure. This means that you need to make sure that you dedicate plenty of time to writing and developing high-quality, effective ads for your business.

Social media marketing through ads – such as Facebook ads – is growing all the time. Developing the perfect social media ad can be a difficult process, but is something that you need to master if you want to create a real online presence.

Unfortunately, there is no tried and tested method when it comes to creating a viral social media marketing ad campaign. Different things work for different people, and you will need to experiment to find what works best for your business and your target audience. With that in mind, some of the things you need to think about include: