Looking for feedback on our nonprofit site

[TinaA]

I work for a nonprofit org which of course means a low budget and paying out of pocket for things (such as training).

Our current website is done by a 3rd party vendor and although it looks nice, we can't make any changes to it without paying for it.  (We can only upload documents).

I'm wondering if anyone in this group will give their feedback on the site in terms of SEO and recommend a platform that would be relatively easy for a small shop to manage.

Our site is www.coastalcommunityfoundation.org

Thanks in advance

[XNUMERIK]

I have taken a quick look at your website.

In terms of SEO, I would say that your vendor didn't do a bad job.

In fact, it would be hard to ask for more than a well structured website, clean URLs, good titles... if you didn't specifically request a Search Engine Optimized website.

Of course, there are many major improvements that could be made like adding a sitemap, a robots.txt file, description to pages...

Here is a tool that will give you a nice broad picture of your website's SEO:

http://www.woorank.com/

Hope that helps!

[EricPratum30]

Hey, Tina.

I second what XNUMERIK said, and given that I have worked with a number of nonprofit clients not all that far from you, I'll add this...

I previously worked with 1,600 nonprofit clients and fully managed sites for maybe 100 or so. For those clients, we budgeted a certain amount of changes into their monthly contracts so that, while yes they were paying for them, they didn't feel nickeled and dimed every time they wanted something updated, a new page created, etc. In some of those cases, we gave clients minimal site access, but not enough that they could potentially mess things up – delete the home page, take down the whole site, and so on. Hopefully, you at least have the ability to create new pages and content yourself. If not, you might consider moving to a provider that will give you full content access... if that is an option of course.

If you choose to move, you have a lot of different options – Wordpress, Squarespace, Drupal, and more. All have their advantages, and all of them have a plethora of design and site management shops dying to find new clients. Unfortunately, in my experience (and maybe yours as well), recoding for a new platform can be very cost-prohibitive, and then depending on how you have your contract set up with your vendor, getting technical help can also be expensive sometimes... not to mention that choosing the wrong provider is not only a huge headache, but also costly.

All in all, your site looks good, but that being said, there are things that I would change – move context setting to the top, increase font size in most places, merge the blog into the site, change the nav items, put much more emphasis on getting email sign ups, and so on. If you haven't gotten one already, apply for a Google Grant. I used to run one for a client that did somewhat similar work to yours, and for only the cost of my management time, we were getting +$18,000 in monthly GIK AdWords spend from Google, which sent over 26,000 monthly visitors to their site and added to the positive increases they were seeing in donations, email sign ups, social media activity, and more. If you're not doing that already, you probably could be.

I hope that helps. Best of luck.

[DanielFreedman]

I worked as a non-profit executive long before I ever got involved  in SEO.

So I appreciate the difficulties with budget, staffing, and training.

That said, I really think the long-term answer is to take more of the work in-house. Given the Rip Van Winkle timelines that can prevail in non-profits, this could be a one or two year process. All the more reason to get started right away!

If you are on another platform, migrating everything to WordPress, for example, is not a small task. But it could probably be done for $1,000 to $2,500 by a developer whose mandate also includes training a staff member or intern for all future updates short of a major redesign. The developer could then lurk in the background, ready to be called on rare occasions. I have been though his process for both for-profit and non-profit clients.

I really think the days of delay, dependency and paying $50-$150 for every minor text or graphic change need to die.

[TinaA]

Thanks.  I'll check out woorank

[TinaA]

I definitely understand a web developer wanting to set limits with clients. I have heard horror stories.

My frustration is that we can't add new content or new pages.  Our quote to integrate the blog with the existing site was $5,000 so we're keeping it on blogger for now.

That's impressive with AdWords.  I've been managing our Google grants account with little success.  Part of me thinks it's because we don't have a whole lot of action steps on our site.  It's not clear what a visitor is supposed to do when they get there.

Thanks for the input.

[TinaA]

I'm trying to make a case at work to bring it in-house so we can have fresh content on the site.  We're also paying the company $100 to host & don't have high traffic so I know we can pay much less -- and get a nonprofit rate in some cases.

I'm hoping to collect comments like these and take them back to work.