Back in 2010, I was employed by a little non-profit organisation called Wellington ICT. We were funded by Wellington City Council to assist community organisations and local non-profits with their online presence. That was the vague extent of the brief.

When I joined as project manager I saw a role filled with potential, but the service had become stagnant and nothing meaningful was happening. So I canvassed. I went to many local non-profits asking them about their online needs and frustrations. Quickly and consistently, I found a pattern of needs and frustrations:

Honestly, I had so many Wellington non-profits tell me the same sad story. I decided to do something about it. The two things in life that truly offend and piss me off are injustice and exploitation. I was seeing both in how web agencies shafted non-profit organisations that only exist to do good. I'm a cheeky socialist and upstart anarchist.

At this point I wasn't a web designer, I was a web content writer and strategist. I taught people how to write specifically for websites. At Wellington ICT ​I ran a series of popular seminars for non-profit organisation managers called: 'How to Write Web Content That Truly Connects with Your Target Audience.' I only intended to run one seminar for 30 participants. Demand meant I ended up running four. The hunger to know was real.

So. I went looking for web content management systems (CMS) that were not hard-coded. These are called 'drag and drop' CMS. You don't need to learn HTML/CSS or Javascript to use them. They come pre-coded. You just need to learn how to use the CMS.

After settling on a really user-friendly and intuitive CMS, I recruited a team of 36 web designers, graphic designers and writers I could train to write for the web.

In all, we created over 40 FREE websites for local non-profit organisations and community groups. I taught each of the organisations how to use the CMS to update and change content themselves. This was incredibly empowering and liberating for those non-profits. The creative autonomy and decision-making oomph was back in their hands.

It was also eye-opening for me. I saw a niche to become a web design and web content specialist for non-profits. The full package. One who wasn't driven by capitalist or profit-margin motives.

​I started with Community Engagement Services. That morphed and evolved into Cheeky Upstart.

To this day, I hear obscene stories from non-profit managers who were cynically gouged by web design companies on price. Many use the dark-arts of design and technology to baffle and inflate the market value of what they do.

We end up both wishing they'd found me first.

I've seen first-hand examples of web design agencies charging staggering amounts for work I can complete in 30 minutes. They get away with it because they know charities and community organisations don't know any better.

​Don't fall for it. You're better than that. Contact Cheeky Upstart and get a revolutionary website from one of your own today. Power to the people.

Writing for the web is a completely unique style of writing. Why? because our brains process online information completely differently to any other medium.

With web content, we read in an F-shaped pattern. We scan (not read-scan) from left to right, then go back to the left starting point and scan downwards.

Also, with effective web content, less is more. As Crawford Kilian said: 'Every sentence, every phrase, every word has to fight for it's life.' Everything on a web page has to earn it's right to be there. If it's not there by appointment, it shouldn't be there at all.

At The Writing Cooperative, Cynthia Marinakos has written a great piece that talks about the rules of effective web content and why our brains process online information so differently than any other type of reading. 

Non-profit websites are unique in that they are mission-based instead of profit-driven.

There are still some benchmarked best practices a lot of Kiwi non-profit websites ignore.

Forbes magazine has listed 7 design mistakes a lot of non-profits make with their websites. Are any of these relevant to yours?