Bootstrapping a charity website

Last week Craig Turpie and the team from Storm ID showed me Council Toolkit, a toolkit for responsive council websites based on work they are doing for City of Edinburgh Council. Council Toolkit has a Creative Commons licence, is free to use, and its open source codebase is available on GitHub. This is a really positive development. And it got me thinking: where's the open source toolkit for charities and other third sector organisations wanting to get a modern website, designed around user needs, up and running quickly? We'd love to hear your tips, so if you've got a suggestion then please get in touch and let us know. In the meantime I thought I'd share two things that can help you get a modern website up and running (a) quickly and (b) for next to nothing.

1. Bootstrap

Bootstrap is a front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile-first projects on the web. It was originally created by a designer and a developer at Twitter, it has a Creative Commons licence, and its open source codebase is available on GitHub.

2. Wordpress

Wordpress started life as a blogging tool and now powers millions of websites around the world (including this one). Again it is open source and free to use and adapt. Many web hosting companies now provide a one-click install for Wordpress so getting up and running is easier than ever.

The Digital Participation team will be thinking about our own web presence over the coming weeks. We'll share what we learn with you as we go, and with a bit of luck will contribute our code back to the community as well.