Essential Needs of a Charity Website

This is blog 2 of the online book entitled ‘Charity fundraising using the Internet’ and discusses the basic generic needs of a website, including loading speeds; dealing with pictures and diagrams; third party applications (flash for example); cluttered code; server congestion; good database design; cookies and miscellaneous points

1.1 BASIC GENERIC NEEDS

If you want your charity to be successful online, your website should serve the needs of your supporters easily, utilizing messages and communications that are readily understood. And because the Internet is an ever evolving platform, you will need to constantly and consistently work at developing your offer too. The following aspects of website design are the basic generic building blocks of success, and they’re all important

1.1.1. Fast Loading

This is blatantly obvious, but a concept that most charities fail to think about! The average patience threshold of today’s Web surfer is now below 10 seconds and falling (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7417496.stm) so if your home page does not load quickly, your supporters will surely click off and go elsewhere. Things that slow loading speeds down include:

a. Pictures can be huge files, often 3mb, so more pictures equals slower speeds. To ameliorate the effects of pictures, there are a number of tactics available:-

- Compress all pictures into .jpg, .png or .gif files

- Specify image dimensions (a x b pixels)

- Slice your images but avoid too many slices

- Don’t resize images within HTML

- Use the ALT tags correctly

- You can control graphic size by reducing the total number of colors used or “crunch” them using any of the popular GIF or JPEG crunching programs available (free programs include GIMP or Google’s PICASA)

b. Flash can be a big problem, if only for the fact that many users do not have it installed. Tactics to reduce flash problems include compressing or eliminating all unnecessary flash elements or using Javascript to implement a picture rotation system. Furthermore, although search engines are slowly increasing their flash readability, as with PDF’s, they won’t follow the links and therefore never get past the homepage! Flash is generally accepted as being very negative for SEO purposes (search engine optimisation)

c. Cluttered Code . To reduce the problems associated with cluttered code, the following tactics are helpful

- Use CCS instead of images- Convert from Table to CSS based layout

- Use external style sheets

- Remove unnecessary white space in HTML

- Use shorthand CSS- Use relative links

- Specify the Doc type

d. Server congestion is an issue

- Reduce http requests from other sites

- Don’t use https:// unless necessary

- Upgrade your web server

- use a tier one provider

- Use Gzip compression to reduce HTML size

- Upgrade server memory

e. Database Design

- To maximize speed of download, separate content and database servers

f. Miscellaneous help points

- Use a loading progress indicator to reduce impatience in users

- Use AJAX instead of page refreshes

- Reduce size and number of cookies