Wednesday 28 January 2015

Create An Online Fundraising Website

As a member of a charitable organization, you may want to put up a website where you can direct people to make donations, whether they are in the form of money, time, talent or products. Every charity should have a website where memberes can educate people about the organization's services, and collect donations from others. Putting up a website can be an easy project, or it can be a daunting task. These instructions recommend that you use free or inexpensive website templates available online, and use your budget for marketing your site, once it is online. On the other hand, if you have someone who has HTML software like Dreamweaver or Front Page, go ahead and enlist this professional's skills to put up your site.


Instructions


1. Register your domain name with a domain name server. When choosing a domain name, be sure that it reflects your organization's name, or is an easy to remember acronym for it. Sometimes the server will let you choose from its templates, and you can easily host your site where you have your domain name registered. This is the easiest way to host a website for accounting purposes. Make sure you use the .org domain name extension. That implies that yours is a fundraising site or charitable group.


2. Decide what you want to include on your website. On the Internet, content is king. Work with your writer and make sure that you choose your keywords carefully. You should select three distinct keywords or phrases that describe your charity, and repeat those words or phrases once every 50 words to achieve the proper keyword density. This is so important. The search engines will review your site based on the content, and if you want people to find it in the top two pages under those keywords, you'll have to use them frequently on your home page.


3. Decide what kind of template you want to use. Most templates that are free or have a nominal cost that will let you change a few things on the template, like the background colors, the text, and obviously, the images. Make sure that you pick the theme of the website to match the type of charity you sponsor.


4. Upload your text, photos or artwork to the website template, and check it for accurate spelling. Make sure that you have your keywords where they need to be. Search engines can't see pictures, but you can add a field behind the picture that they will be able to read. This is a good place to put your top keywords or phrases.


5. Include the links to your linking partners. These are sites that support your activity, and when you have your site up, let them know what your domain is so that they can put the link in to your site. It helps a great deal in getting good positions in all the search engines. Get linking partners lined up before you publish your site so that you come out the door ready to be taken seriously by the search engines. Your linking partners will email you HTML code or send you pictures that they want you to use for your link back to them.


6. Find a company who you want to handle the contributions. It could be PayPal, or some of the others that handle financial transactions for you. If yours is a big charity, you might consider using a credit card processing company. You will have to research what they charge you for their services. After you have selected the processor, put their links on your site so you can take credit cards, debit cards or checks.


7. Publish your site according to the commands that your template or software requires. It may take as long as 24 hours to view it. The server has to let it "propogate," which means that it takes time to get it out there. View your site one it is online, and see if everything is working properly.

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