BBC Radio 2 Website of the Day

Steve Wright and Miles Mendoza

This site was featured as the Radio 2 Website of the Day by Miles Mendoza on the Steve Wright show on BBC Radio 2.

28 July 2004

Here is a transcript of their chat on the radio...

Miles Mendoza: Also today, a really useful service called FreeWebsiteforCharity.com and what this site does is give you all the tools to get your own site online to help your own charitable cause.

You don’t need any special software or technical expertise, you do the whole thing through your web browser.

So it’s really well suited particularly if you’ve got a short-term fund-raising projects or idea you might be working towards a school fete or doing a charity bike ride or something like that.

Steve Wright: Yeah

Miles Mendoza: So it gives you everything you need to get this site online. There are a number of different quick site-builders available, but I think this is one of the quickest and the easiest ones to use that I have seen.

Steve Wright: Presumably it has to be a private thing you are doing for charity. You can’t be working for a charity that is already registered. Like if I was doing a bike ride for Christian Aid, I couldn’t set up a website for that, could I?

Miles Mendoza: Yeah, absolutely you could. It works on two levels! If you’re a new charity and you’ve just got charitable status, and you don’t have an existing website for your charity, then you could use it for that.

Or, if you’re doing a bike ride in aid of another registered charity and you specifically want to publicise your appeal, then you can do site a specifically for your appeal.

Steve Wright: So it’s a kind of a sub-site, isn’t it really?

Miles Mendoza: Yeah, and obviously you would want to link-back to the official site for the charity.

Because it’s only free for the initial six months, that’s why I say it’s ideally suited to a short-term project like that. You can have it permanently, but after the first six months, then you will start to pay a small monthly fee.

Steve Wright: But I think people should be warned most probably Miles that they shouldn’t be setting up a site and claiming that this is the site of that particular charity.

Steve Wright: It is literally a sub-site and linking to the original site.

Miles Mendoza: No, no! Already you will find lots of sites around where people are saying OK, I am doing a charity bike ride in aid of so-and-so and they are never are actually saying we are the official site of Christian Aid, or Save the Children, or Children in Need or whatever.

But you can do a site for your appeal, just as you would do posters for a school fete or whatever it is. It’s an online equivalent of that.

Steve Wright: OK, that’s all very good Miles, how do we get there?

Miles Mendoza: It’s at www.freewebsiteforcharity.com, and you’ll find all the information there at the Website of the Day page at www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/.

Free website for charity | Site builder and hosting services

Important: Please note that in order to protect the integrity of this service and ensure that all funds raised through this initiative are directed to their resperctive charities, we are now required to limit the availability of this service to charity organisations registered at Companies House in the UK and listed at the Charity Commission website or the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) site.