I am involved in a Trust that runs a Community Workshop in Wānaka and used to look after the website for another non-profit Wānaka Wastebusters.
The demands of running a website change all the time along with the expectations of delivering content on social media.
All non-profits have limited resources and we at Pure Web Hosting have been considering for some time what a strategy for successful web engagement would look like with this in mind.
Goals
- It has to be easy to execute for people with limited time and they need to feel empowered enough to keep doing it
- The technology has to stay stable so time invested learning compounds, skipping around tech platforms and re-creating things needlessly is a disaster when a slow burn build up is what we are after
- Creating content is an investment and only publishing it in social media platforms throws away the chance to build up a search engine friendly dataset and/or nicely formatted history of the organisation
- Content created should ideally be published once and automatically propagated widely and reliably into social media making the most of the effort of creating it
- Adding features at low cost should be available with relatively low investment (selling tickets or adding a donate button should not require a big investment in outside help)
- It should be a KISS solution that can be handed over as easily as possible to the next maintainer
- The website should be fungible, it needs to be easy to take it elsewhere if the provider is annoying or increasing costs out of control.
- Price should be low
Looking at the above goals I think I have set myself an impossible task. Below I’ll lay out how these might be achieved over time.
Solutions
This assumes an organisation wishes to have a website. Of course some might only want to exist in social media, those are not dealt with here.
The foundation – The Website Platform
There are many website publishing platforms and content management systems. In 2025 I think it can be summed up like this:
- Squarespace and Wix seems cheap until you start adding things and your website can not be easily moved when they inevitably increase prices or enshitify the service
- We’re talking the demands of a small org here so delivering high volumes of traffic is not assumed to be required
- WordPress runs over 40% !!! of the internet, is fully open source, there are many people who know how to work in it and while it does have a learning curve; any effort made will compound into the future.
So running the website itself with WordPress, hopefully on our hosting service ;-), is, in our humble opinion, the best option. For more on WordPress and the difference between wordpress.com and running it yourself see here.
Setting the style/design the Website
Since 2018 WordPress has a block editing system which enables the creation of quite complex media layouts easily when using a standard theme. It’s evolving and with every free update it gets better.
This means no need to invest in themes that have a yearly subscription or getting one designed specifically for your organisation. Starting with the latest theme WordPress ships with (currently twenty-twenty-five) and going from there works, it’s what this blog uses in it’s most basic form.
Static site content
All sites have these, think Home / About / Our Impact etc. In WordPress these are ‘pages’ and can be easily created with the Block Editor. It takes a bit to learn but once you are there .. it’s quick …
Updates, News, Blogs and making Publish Once Propagate Widely a reality
Most organisations have updates, announcements, news or progress they want to propagate out to the public. In WordPress you can create ‘Posts’ that have a publish date and which are easily presented as a feed or blog.
The important thing here is that you get more engagement publishing this content on the social platforms, and many orgs only do this. It is our belief that pretty soon as say Facebook becomes more irrelevant people are going to really regret creating all that nice content and not being able to easily export it into a platform they have real control of.
The solution here is to publish this content in the WordPress website and then post links to it on the social platforms. You then get the benefits of owning the data and can concentrate on making nice content knowing it will be seen.
How is this achieved? There are WordPress plugins that do it automatically into Facebook and Facebook will automatically post into Instagram or Threads if you wish. You can also, with a free plugin, make your WordPress website a fully fledged node of the ActivityPub driven Mastodon world which is seeing increased adoption and may well become the standard in how to distribute and follow content.
NB: Added 13th Oct 2025: We need to include implementation of Opengraph tags
Cost
The above ideally would cost no more than $200nzd per year to pay for a domain name and a web host who will ensure your website is available and safe.
