How was the talk "Improve your Web: WordPress for Ngos"

The numbers

• pointed to the talk: 23 people.
• Assistants: 12 people.
• It was held last November 12th.
• Place: Ulab (Plaza San Cristóbal, 14 Alicante)

Like every month, remember that we always have after the talk the traditional networking sponsored by Professional Hosting And Weglot At the kiosk of St. Christopher's Square.

Important: We remind you that in the tool Slack have the channel #wpalicante of Slack WordPress Spain registered to organize and to share the management of meetup. If you want to lend a hand, contribute ideas and become more active part of this community follow the instructions on the following page-> http://wp-es.es/slack/

The talk

This time we have the pleasant company of Rafael Ojosnegros (https://mediaredservicios.com), born in Valladolid and now living in Alicante, who, thanks to his 15 years of experience as a WordPress implementer and his altruistic streak, shares with us his experience in designing websites for NGOs, from the basics of the web (domain and hosting) to what we need to take into account if we want to scale up our website's resources, including the plugins and themes that may be most interesting for the organization.

We share some interesting notes on the meetup.

The basis for working with an NGO

• Beware of what people have user to update WP: Being an NGO you can fall into the error that anyone eager to be able and want to help on the web. You have to keep in mind that you can create a lot of chaos if someone with minimal knowledge starts updating the web, because it could put excessive plugins that impactasen in performance, or modify the topic without seeing possible consequences of problems in Updates or incompatibilities with existing plugins... Therefore, one of the first things to be taught to the NGO is a series of minimum guidelines for working in an orderly manner.

• Domain:
  • Find as cheap as possible
  • There are companies that have special offers for NGOs

• Hosting:
  • Flee the free hosts because in the long run can be expensive to find that they have no order in their systems, or do not backup, do not have cpanel to manage the web...
  • As for domains, there are hosting companies with special plans for NGOs. We indicate some:
    • Dinahosting: Donate hosting for your NGO project.
    • Siteground: If you show that you are an NGO give you a free year
    • Webcompany: Although not advertised on your website, also make you a discount if you are an NGO, you have to contact them personally.
    • One.com: They have a very intuitive panel and you can do staging with them very easily and in a minute. For those of you who don't know what staging is, it's a backup of the web that can be used for testing. In Boluda.com explain very well what is staging.

• Plugins: We tell you some interesting plugins:
  • Donorbox: Plugin to manage donations. For NGOs is free up to $1000 billing and from there you charge a very small percentage. Avoids donations leaks.
  • Gravity Forms: To create forms, very intuitive.
  • Give: Another donation plugin that works very well.
  • Woocommerce: To create an online sales page that would allow you to sell all the NGO merchandising. We leave the link of the Meetup where we talk about a theme for this plugin.

• Topics:
  • We do not recommend buying a subject because we are looking to minimize the cost and you can find very interesting free topics.
  • Free:
    • Astra: It usually requires some pagebuilder for the user to be comfortable generating pages.
    • GeneratePress.
    • Customize: It's a simple and fast track, which looks great on smartphones.
  • of payment:
    • Genesis StudioPress: It is not for a basic user because it is actually a work Framework. To understand a little more this topic come to the Talk about topics we did from Wpalicante.
    • Avada and Enfold from ThemeForest: They are highly customizable and have been improved to include GDPR compliance in the theme itself. In addition, Rafa's experience with the creators of these two themes has been positive in terms of maintenance, responding to you in Spanish and even answering questions even if your support has expired (which is not the case with other themes). In general, you have to be careful with ThemeForest themes because they can become very large, which will affect the performance of the website (customization can help minimize this effect), and they can have compatibility issues, especially if you have to add many plugins or WooCommerce. In addition, it should be noted that ThemeForest does not comply with the GPL on its portal, so we cannot support this type of initiative from the meetup. Remember that WordPress is developed under a GPL license, which means that all the software used is free and must be available to anyone so that they can modify it to suit their needs. What can be sold is support/service, training, documentation, maintenance... but not the software itself.
  • Other services:
    • Lexblogger: is a payment service to have control of paperwork, comply with regulations such as RGPD/cookies... to have under control the entire legal issue associated with a web.
    • Powtoon: Web animations. It has a free version that allows you to make an animation per month.

Other WordPress topics covered at the meetup

• Gutemberg in the new version of WordPress:
  • The 19/11 is published.
  • is the 5.0
  • Includes the famous Gutemberg to layout both the entries and the pages.
  • Since the last update (now you can try as a plugin) seems to have substantially improved the consumption of resources, but should be analyzed well to be objective.
  • Topic developers have to adapt them so that they can work with Gutemberg, although the change is quite simple.
  • No topic will look bad after this update, another thing is that it can be used in the generation of new entries/pages with all its potential.
  • It has a lot of blocks of different types to layout the entries/pages, to the API of Google Maps, that indicating the direction that you want to remark shows you to the map.
  • You can get up to 6 columns with photos and HTML in each column.
  • On the web Semanawp.com You have very interesting information about Gutemberg, some is more technical but there is another more accessible to the general public.
• Zapier:
  • It is a process automatist to automatically move information between your Web applications.
  • Among other advantages, it allows to upload documentation directly to the cloud and you get a warning email. So you can save, for example, forms that the user generates through the Web.
  • Since Office 365 are developing a tool of the package that will make the competition to Zapier.
• Working with Cookies:
  • Rafa's advice is to follow the steps that mark from Lexblogger. It is the best way to be sure to do the right thing legally speaking.

Next WordPress meetup

The next meetup will be on December 10th, 2018 and shall be attended by Antonio Muñoz, SEO Consultant and web Analytics that will talk about how to improve your website by finding the key words that will make you earn money.

We wait for you in the Ulab of Alicante in the plaza of San Cristóbal, 14.

Some photos