15 Ways to Create a Horrible Non-profit Website

  1. Let everyone on your staff and board give feedback on your design, and apply everyone’s preferences.
  2. Put someone in charge who doesn’t care about the website.
  3. Replace pages or menu items with PDFs.
  4. Make your mission statement about six paragraphs long and put it front and center of the homepage.
  5. Hide the donation forms. It also helps to make it really hard to use.
  6. Don’t apply any kind of strategy to the site. Just throw it up and assume you’ll get support.
  7. Make sure you don’t look “too polished,” because no one will give you money unless the site looks like it was built on a shoestring.
  8. Assume no one looks at your site.
  9. Put up a bunch of unrelated pages with an unclear and incoherent message.
  10. Design for your board members (or yourself) rather than your audience.
  11. Leave development to a volunteer.
  12. Leave design to a volunteer.
  13. Play hot potato with updating website pages. The biggest sucker is in charge of keeping it current.
  14. Forget about your other communications efforts. Never cross reference them. Never meet with the people in charge of putting them together.
  15. Make your decision on a web developer based on cost alone, assuming you don’t always get what you pay for.

Monique Cuvelier spends her days at Talance sorting through the muck and creating fabulous non-profit websites. Contact her for advice on how.

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6 Responses to “15 Ways to Create a Horrible Non-profit Website”

  1. Best Links: Foursquare Fundraising, Finding Your Bill Gates, Social Media Don’ts « My Blog Says:

    [...] offers 15 Ways to Create a Horrible Non-profit Website. This is a terrific list for a website [...]

  2. Future Fundraising Now Says:

    Tips for a terrible nonprofit website…

    In case you want your website to be really, really bad, here are some tips from the Talance blog, at 15 Ways to Create a Horrible Non-profit Website. Here are a few of the 15: Let everyone on your staff and board give feedback on your design, and apply…

  3. Elaine Fogel Says:

    Love it! :)

  4. Great Tips for Creating a Horrible School Website | Catholic School Web Design Blog Says:

    [...] links to our Twitter account, but we couldn’t resist with this one. It’s a list of 15 ways to create a horrible non-profit website, and each one is very funny while being painfully [...]

  5. Talance Says:

    Painful but true. Sounds like you’ve been there, Elaine. My sympathies.

  6. Non-Profit Website Chaos: Avoid These 15 Design Gaffes :Idle-Thoughts Says:

    [...] I came across this wonderful (and accurate) post from Talance, a Boston area non-profit website company, titled, “15 Ways To Create a Horrible Non-Profit Website.” [...]

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