5 ways to make your DIY charity website look less DIY

Feb 2026

Is your charity’s website a DIY job? Fair enough. Often that’s the best way to get started, get something off the ground and get moving. Ideally you’ll upgrade to a professionally designed and built one in the future, but I know it can take time to get the budget for that.

In the meantime, here are five ways to make your homemade site look a little less homemade.

1. Have a professional domain and email address

You want to build trust and credibility, and it’s hard to do that when your site is at yourcharity.wordpress.com and your emails are coming from yourcharity@gmail.com. The world of domains can feel daunting if you’re not very techy, but it’s worth the faff. A domain (that means something like yourcharity.com) will only cost you around a tenner a year. You can then ‘point’ this so it becomes the address of your site. There will be step by step instructions for how to do this in the help documents wherever you built your site.

The company you buy your domain from may offer email hosting too, so you can access emails though their mailbox. If you want a more familiar set up, you can use something like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to create email addresses for your team. I use the privacy-friendly Fastmail. Generally these cost a few pounds per month per person.
As you can see it will cost a little bit, but not loads. And it’s worth it to show beneficiaries, funders and donors that you are a legitimate and professional organisation.

2. Sort your favicon

You know that little picture to the left of the webpage title in your browser tab? That’s a favicon. Please tell me you don’t have what I call the ‘grey cube of doom’ next to yours (that’s the default icon on Squarespace sites). Don’t worry, it’s easy to fix.

Make a simple (remember it’s very small!) and square version of your logo on a plain or transparent background. If you worked with a designer you can ask them, or make it yourself on something like Canva. Even just the initial letter of your organisation in your brand colour looks good.

Once you have your favicon, you need to add it to your site. Here are the instructions for WordPress, Squarespace and Wix.

The favicon is such a small thing but it really sticks out as an indicator of a DIY site. Take a few minutes and make a big difference.

3. Use white space

I know you want to fit everything on the page. You’ve got so much to say, so many important things people need to know. But cramming every inch full of text, images, and buttons makes your site a busy nightmare. The human eye gets tired with too much information and a crowded scene means it’s hard to pick out important details.

Give things room to breathe. Put plenty of spacing between elements and sections and try to keep it consistent. Text shouldn’t stretch across the whole page; a good rule of thumb is less than 100 characters in width. White space doesn’t necessarily mean white. Your site or section background can be any colour – as long as the text colour is readable on top!

If in doubt, add a bit more space. It’s better if it looks a little too roomy than too cluttered.

4. Use consistent fonts and colours

If your site is a DIY job, chances are you’ve doing your own brand design, too. Or maybe you got a designer to make you a logo. Either way, my advice for the look of your website is: keep it simple.

Choose a maximum of two fonts: one for titles/headings and one for the body text (AKA everything else). You might want to use the font from your logo as the header font. As long as they are clear and consistent, it will look fine. Don’t be tempted by curly whirly handwritten-looking options! Or Comic Sans.

It’s the same with colours. Having too many looks messy and incoherent. Choose a simple palette of four or five that go together, including some dark and light. Coolours palette generator is a great (and fun!) tool to have a play around with. Don’t be afraid to include an off-white as a background colour. Readable, understandable and usable trumps jazzy every time.

5. Check what it looks like on mobile

More than half your visitors are probably looking at your site on their phones. If you’ve only ever viewed it on your laptop, you need to stop right now and pull it up on your mobile.

Does the text shrink down to ant-size? Or go weirdly massive? Do the buttons overlap? Are your social icon links taking up half the page for some reason? Do images spill off the edge?

Most modern website builders are responsive (adjust automatically for mobile) by default, but that doesn’t mean your particular choices haven’t broken something. Check every page. It’s tedious but necessary. If people can’t easily navigate and read your site on mobile, they’ll leave. And if they were about to donate or sign up, that’s an opportunity lost.

Conclusion

None of these things cost much money. Some cost nothing at all. But together, they’ll take your site from ‘someone’s nephew built this’ to ‘this is a legitimate organisation’. You’re doing valuable work and your website should reflect that, even if it’s homemade.

Molly writes a weekly SHORT newsletter with tips for your website, your business and random facts and trivia. Sign up at https://www.mollygetsitdone.com/signup/