The charity I am writing about supports child survivors of sexual and domestic abuse in Nottingham. They have around 45 members of staff. They are the go-to service for their area. And when I first looked at their website, the CSS had stopped loading.
On a phone, the site was unusable. The plugins were out of date. The security was a concern. For any business, that is bad. For a charity that needs people to find them and trust them, it is worse.
They had been working with a large agency. Something had gone wrong along the way. I am not interested in pointing fingers – these things happen. But the result was a broken website and a working relationship that was not working anymore.
What goes wrong with large agencies and charities
I want to be fair here. Agencies do good work. But there are a few things that can make the relationship difficult for a smaller organisation.
When you work with a large agency, your project is one of many. There are layers between you and the person actually building your site. Responses slow down. Getting something changed takes longer than it should. For a charity with a lean team and real work to do, that lag has a cost.
Price is the other thing. Agencies carry real overheads – staff, offices, management layers – and those costs come back to you. A charity that is careful with every pound of funding needs a setup that reflects that.
As a freelance web designer based in Harrogate, I work differently. One person. Direct communication. I turn things around the same day, because there is nothing in the way.
How we built the site
I worked directly with their head therapist, who also has a background in graphic design. That made things easier from the start. She could talk to me in visual terms and she understood what she was looking at. She had already done a lot of the groundwork – style tiles and wireframes – so we were not starting from nothing.
There was no big reveal. We built it in stages. She fed back. I refined. That kind of iterative approach takes more time than a handover at the end, but the result is better because the client has been part of it throughout. We both knew what we were building and why.
I rebuilt the site on WordPress using Divi 5 and custom CSS. It is fully responsive now. The security problems are gone. It shows up well in search results, which matters for a service that people need to be able to find quickly.
It is a site that does its job. For a charity of their standing, that is what it should be.
What Tara said
“Andy did and continues to do an absolutely amazing job in creating and maintaining my organisation’s website. He provides valuable expert advice and is always prompt in replies and action.”
The bit about being prompt – that is the part I want to draw attention to. Not because I am blowing my own trumpet, but because it was exactly what had been missing before.
A charity working with survivors of abuse cannot afford to wait three weeks for a reply. Their website is a tool for their work. When something is wrong with it, they need someone who picks up the phone.
Pricing for charities and non-profits
If you are a registered charity or non-profit organisation looking for a freelance web designer in the third sector, I give a 20% discount. No fuss, no application. Just let me know when you get in touch.
Charity web design in Yorkshire and across the UK does not have to cost as much as you might think. If you have been putting your site off because you assume it will be expensive, it is worth having a conversation first.
If this sounds familiar
If your charity’s website is broken, out of date, or stuck in a slow-moving agency relationship, I am happy to talk. I am based in Harrogate but I work with organisations across the UK.
