Thunder Bay Information Technology Solutions TBayIT - A Guide to Information Technology for Non-Profits

Accessibility and Ease of Use

Accessibility is imperative to organizations that serve disabled persons. You have to see your website in their eyes. Having extremely small fonts or bad colour combinations can make your site inaccessible to those you serve. Accessiblity standards and more information can be found on the W3.org website. Another important part of accessiblity and ease of use is to make sure your site adheres to standards. By following these standards you are ensuring your visitors can view your site no matter what browser/software they are using.
• Click Here to visit www.w3.org
• Click here to visit www.w3.org/WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative)

Be Interactive and Informative - Update Often

Adding simple features to your website can easily increase your traffic and likelyhood of return visitors. Interactive features such as forums and polls will raise interest and add a flair to your website. Websites that have information that isn't regularly updated or seldom changes will cause visitors not to return to your site. An example of an open source free to use forum is phpBB for Linux Servers and Snitz Forums for Windows Servers.
• Click here to visit www.phpBB.com
• Click here to visit Forum.Snitz.com

Know your Visitors

It is very important to be aware of your visitors and how they are viewing your site. Statistics can be good indicators to which pages are seldom visited and which are the most popular. Many hosting providers will have free statistics for you to view or you can use a free service like StatCounter.com.
• Click here to visit www.StatCounter.com

Keep in Touch

Many non-profit organizations have to send out newsletters at multiple intervals during the year. Why not save on postage and paper by emailing your newsletter. Some people may not prefer this method but many others will as it is delivered directly to their inbox. Best practise to email anything to multiple recipients is to put all the email addresses in the BCC field and not in the TO or CC field (that way everybody cannot see everyone who is a recipient and this method also reduces spam). If your newsletters are quite lengthy it is a good idea to simplify what you send to your list by using short descriptions of each article that link to the full article on your website.

Be Found by Search Engines

Just having a web address isn't going to get people to your site. Many people are unaware that to get to a specific web address that they have to enter it into the address bar at the top of the browser and not into a search engine. If you are not listed in a particular searching engine you may be missing potential visitors. There are many programs that will submit your site or you can do it manually. Search Engine Optimization has become a science itself and there are many ins and outs to learn to make your site rank first. A few of these techniques include good page titles, lots of content with your keywords, and lots of inbound links (ie links from other websites to your website).

• Return to Contents •