When it comes to building your nonprofit there are a lot of things to focus on – grant writing, fundraising, program development, staff training, outreach, social media campaigning, etc. But there is one thing all of these have in common. Whether I am a donor, a user of your services or a grantor I am going to visit your website. In fact, visiting your website is likely the first thing I am going to do. So, it should be obvious just how important it is to have a website that makes a professional first impression.
Creating a good looking website isn’t that difficult. I use WordPress for nearly all my sites these days. WordPress is easy to learn and provides a solid platform on which to build your website. WordPress comes with themes that change the look and feel of your website. And each theme has settings where you can adjust your websites title, tagline and background color. But for the most part, that is the extent of customizing if you are using a free WordPress theme.
But imagine if you could have complete control over the entire look and feel of your WordPress website. It is actually really simple to do this. Just get a premium theme. Sure it cost a little money (about $50), but what you get is an awesome looking website with a lot of power and control.
With a premium theme you get upwards to 50 customization options. And each area of customization has its own sub-section. For example, when I customize the Jupiter theme I can select “styling” which then gives me the option to customize the: general coloring, main navigation, header toolbar, page title, sidebar, footer and miscellaneous. When I select one of these I then get a whole other set of customization options.
Here are screenshots of the customization areas of some different themes.
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- Basic Theme
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- Jarida Theme
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- Jupiter Theme
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- Worldwide Theme
The screenshots should give you an idea of just how much more robust a premium theme is than a free theme. And with just a few hours of tinkering in the theme settings you can go from a “blah-de-dah” website to a “wow, oh my” website. Which impressions would you like to make?
The themes used in this demo are the:
I hope this was helpful.
