Mark Root-Wiley Publishes Free Guide for Nonprofits That Use WordPress

One of WordPress’ greatest strengths is that it’s free to download and use. This makes it an excellent choice for nonprofit organizations that have a small budget. Nonprofits that can’t afford a developer to maintain their sites may opt to run it on their own.

Managing a WordPress site requires a basic understanding of how plugins, themes, and WordPress works. Thankfully, there’s a new guide available called NonprofitWP, by Mark Root-Wiley, that tailors specifically to nonprofits that choose to manage their own sites with WordPress.

Front Page to Nonprofit WordPress Guide

The guide covers the following topics:

Things to know before you get started

Domains and Hosting

Installing WordPress

Choosing a Theme

Selecting Plugins

Entering and Managing Content

Keeping Your Site Healthy

There’s also a resources section with links to products and services that have special offers for nonprofits. Some of the products and services have an affiliate code that kicks back a certain percentage of sales to Root-Wiley.

Root-Wiley published the guide in an effort to help nonprofits make the right decisions, “A good WordPress website is easy to manage and maintain, but a bad one is time-consuming and expensive to maintain. Making smart decisions when you get started with a new WordPress site is key to avoiding headaches later,” he said.

“I’ve had a lot of clients where our first project was cleaning up after a volunteer or staff member who tried to do the site on their own. Sometimes that’s a live site and other times it’s a refresh that’s hit a wall. One time, I was the ​seventh​ developer on a project, but I was the first paid one and the one to launch the site.

“So many of the problems these projects run into are in the very early stages where they went all in with a bad theme, picked the wrong plugin, or quite commonly, didn’t think through or understand their organization’s needs and how those should translate to a website,” Root-Wiley told the Tavern.

Instead of publishing the information in an e-book, he used WordPress, “I chose to publish it as a website because I think that’s the most user-friendly format and I don’t want anything to get in the way with people accessing the information,” Root-Wiley said.

While he doesn’t plan to open source the site anytime soon, people can submit content suggestions and ideas through the site’s contact form.