This post is now out of date! Static sites can be as powerful!
When I am surfing the net for Non-profit causes to reach out to it sometimes feels like I am time traveling. Time travelling ? Do Tell... A vast amount of Non-profit websites are stuck in 1996 and the age of geocities, with pixelated animated gifs and TK. Static Html sites were fine circa 1996 but we live in the day and age of RSS feeds and the Social Web. Your static site is, well, just to static.
Google loves fresh content for the purposes of search engine optimization. Wordpress and other blogging platforms have a build in pinger that automatically tell Google when something new is published. The 'pinger' tells google to send it's spiders (eek! spiders!) over to your site and re-index your content. Static HTML sites do not have this luxury. They have to sit and wait for the spiders to come back, which can sometimes take a month or two. This means you are missing out on potential search traffic and is sheer madness (why would you do this?).
Static html webpages are notoriously hard to update, as they require some coding know how. Going in and fighting with html can be time consuming and that time could be better spent on creating the actually content for your site.
With the power of blogging platforms like Wordpress or Blogger, users have the option to syndicate their content to a variety of Social media sites with their RSS feed. Static HTML websites require a manual submittal to a lot of these sites. Manual labor that could be automated and is still done by hand is both stupid and redundant. Time is a finite resource, don't waste it, please.
Static HTML again requires a semi-advanced understanding of HTML coding. You have better things to do with both your cause and time than to sink a bunch of time into learning how to code. Wordpress allows you to easily intergrate plugins to increase the functionality of your site with a few clicks of the mouse. (Functionality like adding analytics, adding your email list to your side bar, TK, TK, TK, TK.)
Static Sites can be the bottleneck for a lot of charity and non-profit organizations due to their inability to edit and add their own content. Waiting for "the web guy" to update content can waste a lot of time. That content could be out there on the net spreading it's goodness across the land, instead of sitting in your "web guy's" email box.
Lets face it. You know your website looks old and Ugly (Hey it's got character!). Hiring a web design to update the design has not been in the budget for some time. Don't let this stop you. There are literally thousands of Free professional looking Wordpress templates out there waiting for you to slap it onto your site. Sites like WordpressMotif, Top WP Themes, & Themes2WP just to name a few. If you are willing to shell out 20-35 bucks on a even better looking theme I recommend ThemeForest. Check out our list of Wordpress theme sites/resources to find the theme thats right for you.
It's old, not very search friendly, lacks rss, not to mention other functionality limitations & quite frankly looks bad. Having a self hosted Wordpress site is one of the best things you can do for your online presence. It is open source, a.k.a. free to use, and constantly being updated by a whole army of web developers. Think of them like volunteers, continually improving the system on which your site is (/should be) on. Design costs are nothing, or next to nothing, with the ability to apply free pre-made themes. It's a no brainer and we are here to help. Socialize Your Cause.
If you know of a non-profit or charity website out there that screams "make-over time" let us know in the comments below! This is all in good fun, so please don't get offended. Here's one of our favorites http://v5.jasongraphix.com/index.php