Web Design for Nonprofits

Your website is your first impression—is it making a good one?

I know. Website re-designs feel like a massive hassle, and maybe you’ve been burned in the past—your organization spent what felt like way too much on a new website that started to feel obsolete way too soon.

At GPS, we don’t just design websites; we manage nonprofits, so we’re different from the typical web designer. GPS offers practical web design for nonprofits, focused on usability and functionality without the enormous price tag. We understand your unique needs, and can meet them better than the techies or a build-your-own site (where you don’t have as much control as you think you do).

We build and manage website for nonprofit organizations—such as professional associations, accrediting bodies and fundraising charities. We know you need a versatile, powerful platform—one that can handle event registrations, donations, membership registrations, members-only content protection, on-demand continuing education and an ever-present demonstration of the support of your mission.

But you also need a website that’s easy to use—for your leadership and volunteers, for example. You need a website that won’t be entirely obsolete in five years when it might need a face-lift, so you don’t have to start over from square one. And hey—let’s be honest, the bottom-line is crucial. You’d prefer if it didn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars, right?

All of the above is what we define as practical web design for nonprofits. GPS can deliver.

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Practical Web Design for Nonprofits: What You’ll Get from GPS

We build websites on WordPress—here’s why. WordPress powers 35% of all the websites on the internet, and is by far the most popular content management system out there. There’s reasons for its popularity, and its popularity has its benefits. WordPress is an open source platform that gets very regular updates, both of which keep your website and information secure. Its popularity also means there are countless resources available for helping you, your leaders and your volunteers understand how to work with the platform. There are also countless, regularly updated out-of-the-box solutions called plugins which add functionality and versatile integrations with other services—at a small fraction of the cost of a custom-coded web platform or member management system, for example.

With build-your-own builders like Squarespace or Wix, those platforms keep a lot of control. They only integrate with certain services, so you have to use a specific payment processor or a specific email service, for example. They also share a weakness with many tech services companies that build custom websites—if you want something fixed or changed, or a custom solution built for you, they hold a monopoly on your website. You have to go through them. With WordPress, you have all the control—we’re not building a website for you that only we know how to use, or that only we can build on and change. If you need to, you can easily contract with other developers who have experience with the platform—because it’s the most popular infrastructure on the internet!

We also have good reason to believe in the longevity of this open source, most-popular website platform. Let’s take a forward-looking view at a timeline if you build your website with GPS: in five years, you’ll have a website that can easily receive a cosmetic face-lift to stay slick & trendy without needing to change how the website works or how users interact with it. In ten years, you’ll have a website that might need some functional updates, but one that is built on a continually updated infrastructure that hasn’t gone obsolete—you won’t need to start from square one. In fact, you may find some brand new out-of-the-box solutions that work perfectly for your needs. In fifteen years, your website may look and feel completely different, but I bet you’ll still be using WordPress, and it’ll still be keeping your website costs at a minimum.

Practical Web Design for Nonprofits: What That Doesn’t Include

There are plenty of services that promise a perfectly seamless management and user experience—a faultless, perfectly custom one-stop shop for all of your organization’s needs (and your unanticipated, future needs). We’ll tell you the truth: we can’t predict the future.

The bottom-line is, we’re looking out for your bottom-line while providing support and services that are adaptable for any future! You won’t be getting a perfectly custom, one-of-a-kind website that perfectly meets your every need and want and integrates perfectly with all your old software. If someone else is promising that, they’re either naive or asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But we’ll work with you to get as close to that perfectly custom feel as we can, as inexpensively as possible. We have deep experience with a wide range of out-of-the-box plugin solutions, so we know what will be versatile or slick enough to meet your needs. We also have developers licenses for many of these solutions, keeping your costs lower.

And we work with nonprofits in our day-to-day, so we know the importance of working with you so that you understand and are able to use your new website as if you developed it yourself.

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