UK Online Charities – I did give quite a bit of thought to whether this was an acceptable site to build, but then I considered why charities have affiliate programmes, the purpose being to attract donations from people who may not have donated previously, or who used to donate & then stopped. If promoting the charities online, without offering any incentive to the user (charities used to appear on cashback websites and there were cases of people setting up a direct debit for £3, getting their £10-15 cashback & then cancelling the direct debit), earns the charity a new donater, then it is morally acceptable to build an affiliate site around it.

I even signed up to the Lottoaid programme myself & still make my regular donation every month ) (Lottoaid is the weekly fundraising lottery of international development charity, ActionAid.)

The initial list of charities added to the site were: Action Against Hunger, ActionAid – Sponsor a Child, ActionAid – Gifts in Action, ActionAid – LottoAid, Age Concern, British Red Cross, Cancer Research UK, Cancer Research UK – Virtual Gifts, Childline, Children in Crisis, CLIC Sargent, Compassion in World Farming, Farm Africa – Presents, Farm Africa – Farm Friends, Great Ormond Street Hospital, Greenpeace, NDCS, NDCS Challenges, NSPCC, Oxfam Unwrapped, PDSA, Plan UK, Practical Presents, Present Aid, RSPB, Shelter, Shelter Build A City campaign, Sight Savers International, The Aspinall Foundation, The Blue Cross, The Childrens Society, The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, Torture Care, Unicef, World Land Trust, World Vision Child Sponsorship, World Vision Alternative Gift Catalogue, WSPA, WWF Adoption & WWF Membership. I also added in a few charity credit cards & also included on the front page, a few click through programmes which generate donations from simply clicking on the links (no commission is paid for these).

I also decided to create this site solely in CSS using a Dreamweaver extension called Eric Meyer’s CSS SCULPTOR™ from Web Assist. Eric Meyer is a renowned CSS master & the extension is very easy to use (apart from the occasional freeze up!). I am actually learning more from using this & playing around with the site afterwards, than I have done by reading books, but if you are interested in learning about CSS, my store has plenty of books/software on all aspects of web design!!

The site is up and running now & has made a few sales….I think it needs more text links as it uses banners at the moment & as people are much more likely to click on a text link than a banner, it may need a little updating soon.

On May 30th Plan UK launches a month long ‘Sponsor a Girl’ online recruitment campaign. The campaign is timed to coincide with the 2008 launch of Plan’s ‘Because I am a Girl’ report.