A home page slider showcases Neighborhood Ministries’ main bodies of work. Click the image to visit the site.

An Ohio non-profit organization’s new website shows how a development team can deliver both the economy of a template and the flare of customization in the same site.

Neighborhood Ministries, which operates three community centers in Youngstown and Campbell, built its new website on a WordPress theme with Pecchia Communications, a Youngstown public relations firm that donated its time on the project.

But far from being constrained by the limitations typical of WordPress, the team tweaked the style sheet considerably to achieve a design that supported the ministry’s content needs.

“We like the site because it tells our audiences a lot about who we are,” said Mark Samuel, executive director at Neighborhood Ministries. “For financial reasons, we had been restricted in the past to a very limited presence that didn’t fully reflect our story. Our new site does deliver that message and also makes it easier for us to add content.”

The new site also includes more pictures, more information about how supporters can get involved, larger and cleaner text, attractive labels and a new online donation feature. It also sports a user-friendly tool for adding text and pictures.

Here are two of the other slider panels.
Click the image to visit the site.

Inner-city ministry emerges

Neighborhood Ministries was established in Campbell in the early 1900s, primarily to serve the families of immigrant steelworkers. It still operates a neighborhood center in Campbell’s Kirwan Homes neighborhood, another in Youngstown’s Rockford Village and one on Youngstown’s West Side.

It provides a broad range of services to low-income children and families living in those neighborhoods, including afterschool programming for children, teen job readiness training, clothing banks, food distributions, free tax return preparation, community computer centers and more, some through its own staff and some through partnerships with other local professionals and organizations.

All of its work reflects a Christian focus.

Affordable website development

Like many non-profits, Neighborhood Ministries for many years lacked the financial and staff resources to develop an attractive website. But advances in communication technology in recent years have made it easier for the ministry to tell its story.

“Websites don’t require the massive capital investments they once did,” said Eric Hamilton of Pecchia Communications, who spearheaded the Neighborhood Ministries project. “New tools make it easier to update a site and, most importantly, keep it fresh.”

Hamilton offers this advice for non-profits and other organizations looking to update their sites without knocking their financial results offline:

• Do some research. Check out what similar organizations, including larger competitors, are doing online.
• Get a professional involved. Yes, that’s an extra cost, but an outside expert will know more about what tools are available and eliminate a lot of dead ends. That can save a lot of management team time.
• Have a plan, a budget and a timetable. By breaking down the component tasks on a week by week basis, a team can move work along more efficiently.  A qualified professional can help determine what those various tasks are and how long they ought to take.

“The tools that have become available just in the past two to three years are pretty remarkable,” Hamilton said. “Organizations that haven’t updated their sites since then might be surprised to hear how little a solid, new, well-planned site can cost.”