Tips for creating a Website

Here Are Some Helpful Tips That I Learned in Class and Online for Making A Successful Website

1

Choose a topic and a good name for your website. The topic should be fairly narrow to make it easier to find in search engines. If you’re promoting your business, that makes a good topic. If you would just like to create a website on your favorite hobby, “gardening” for example, consider narrowing it down: “vegetable gardening,” “rose gardening” or “gardening in (your state).” The name should be catchy and describe the topic. Ensure that your website name is not a registered trademark or there can be legal ramifications.

2

Provide good content for your visitors. Content refers to what is on your website. It can be audio or video clips, images or written text. People come to your website either for information or entertainment. Provide them with what they are seeking, in high quality, to ensure their return and possibly recommendations to others. Most commonly, content is in the form of written articles, tips or facts about your topic.If you are writing your own content, ensure that your information is accurate, interesting and in some way unique so that it stands out from other websites. Always double-check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If you don’t feel your content-producing skills are up to par, buy content from professional content producers or distributors. Or, seek out amateur writers on the Internet who offer free content.

3

Aesthetics can sometimes be the difference between a boring website and a great one. Lay out the elements of the page in sections that are clearly defined, rather than lumping it all together. Use a simple background with a contrasting text that pops and is easy to read. Vary font size. Use bold, underline or italics for titles, subtitles, headings and subheadings. To keep your content easy to read, avoid varying font size and style excessively within the body of the text. Make links a different color so they are easy to distinguish. Scatter a few graphics around the page that are eye-catching and relevant. Each page should have something unique to contribute to the website.

4

Be considerate of your visitors. Don’t make your page so wide that visitors have to scroll left and right to see it all. Don’t make pages excessively long, either. Articles that would require more than five page frames to read should be split up into separate pages. Don’t overload your pages with graphics so that it takes a long time to load. Do your visitors a favor: Compress your files. Don’t use blinking graphics or text, a lot of animation or automatic sounds, as these can be annoying and are the mark of an amateur website. Don’t bombard visitors with ads. Would you tune into an all-commercial radio station that plays a song every hour? Your visitors are there to see what you have to offer, not be bombarded with advertisements. Don’t disguise ads to trick visitors into clicking on them, either. Avoid pop-ups. Ensure that your text is legible against your background. If it contains images, unless they are very subtle and monochromatic, text can be very hard to read. When using image backgrounds, carefully select a text and font that stand out against it.

5

Make your site easy to navigate. Use menus or a table of contents. Include a link to the home page on each page. Make use of buttons for easy clicking. Test your links when you first add them to make sure they are working. Test them all again occasionally, and remove broken links immediately

What building a website can do for your small business!

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Steve Strauss on how building a website can increase your business' exposure.

NGO Staff

I am not sure if all people are aware but not all people working for non-governmental organizations are volunteers. Paid staff members typically receive lower pay than in the commercial private sector. Employees are highly committed to the aims and principles of the organization. The reasons why people volunteer are usually not purely altruistic, but self-serving: They expect to gain skills, experience and contacts. There is some dispute as to whether expatriates should be sent to developing countries. Frequently this type of personnel is employed to satisfy a donor, who wants to see the supported project managed by someone from an industrialized country. However, the expertise these employees or volunteers may have can be counterbalanced by a number of factors: the cost of foreigners is typically higher, they have no grassroot connections in the country they are sent to and local expertise is often undervalued. The NGO-sector is an important employer in terms of numbers. For example, by the end of 1995, CONCERN worldwide, an international Northern NGO working against poverty, employed 174 expatriates and just over 5,000 national staff working in ten developing countries in Africa and Asia, and in Haiti.

Shift in topics for FInal Paper

At first I was thinking about option #1- A critical overview of the material and topics covered in the course.  And as I begun my paper I decided to investigate NGO's a bit and found 2 that interest me a lot.  Therefore I am going to shift topics and choose option #4- Examine the websites of several NGO's which operate in several countries.  Find one which you would join, and one which you would not join.  I am going to give a small overview of NGO's becuase I did not realize how powerful some of them can be. 

Types of NGOs

There are numerous possibilities to classify NGOs. The following is the typology the World Bank uses 1:

Operational NGOs
Their primary purpose is the design and implementation of development-related projects. One categorization that is frequently used is the division into relief-oriented or development-oriented organizations; they can also be classified according to whether they stress service delivery or participation; or whether they are religious and secular; and whether they are more public or private-oriented. Operational NGOs can be community-based, national or international.

Advocacy NGOs
Their primary purpose is to defend or promote a specific cause. As opposed to operational project management, these organizations typically try to raise awareness, acceptance and knowledge by lobbying, press work and activist events.

AcronymsNongovernmental organizations are an heterogenous group. A long list of acronyms has developed around the term 'NGO'.
These include:
INGO stands for international NGO, such as CARE;
BINGO is short for business-oriented international NGO;
RINGO is an abbreviation of religious international NGO such as Catholic Relief Services;
ENGO, short for environmental NGO, such as Global 2000;
GONGOs are government-operated NGOs, which may have been set up by governments to look like NGOs in order to qualify for outside aid;
QUANGOs are quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations, such as the W3C and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which is actually not purely an NGO, since its membership is by nation, and each nation is represented by what the ISO Council determines to be the "most broadly representative" standardization body of a nation. Now, such a body might in fact be a nongovernmental organization--for example, the United States is represented in ISO by the American National Standards Institute, which is independent of the federal government. However, other countries can be represented by national governmental agencies--this is the trend in Europe.

NGO stages of development

Three stages or generations of NGO evolution have been identified by Korten’s (1990) Three Generations of Voluntary Development Action. First, the typical development NGO focuses on relief and welfare, and delivers relief services directly to beneficiaries. Examples are the distribution of food, shelter or health services. The NGO notices immediate needs and responds to them. NGOs in the second generation are oriented towards small-scale, self-reliant local development. At this evolutionary stage, NGOs build the capacities of local communities to meet their needs through 'self reliant local action'. Korten calls the third generation 'sustainable systems development'. At this stage, NGOs try to advance changes in policies and institutions at a local, national and international level; they move away from their operational service providing role towards a catalytic role. The NGO is starting to develop from a relief NGO to a development NGO.

The purpose of NGO's

NGOs exist for a variety of purposes, usually to further the political or social goals of their members. Examples include improving the state of the natural environment, encouraging the observance of human rights, improving the welfare of the disadvantaged, or representing a corporate agenda. However, there are a huge number of such organizations and their goals cover a broad range of political and philosophical positions. This can also easily be applied to private schools and athletic organizations.