Maryrose Lyons blogging since 2003...

Whose Site Came First? Concern or Trocaire?

February 18, 2010 at 11:01 am

I always use Trocaire’s site as an example in my web writing training as how to break the number 1 rule of writing for the web.

It’s all about Me Me Me. When you’re writing, you should always spin your content so it’s written to the person reading it and not ‘all about us the business and how great we are… bla bla”. Trocaire is a good example because it carries a beautiful design and is constructed with an eye to the user’s intentions, so at first glance you might think it’s a great site. Only when you engage with the content do you realise that it’s not doing all it should be.

So I’m quite familiar with the site. You can imagine my surprise this morning when I looked at Concern’s site and found… they are more or less the same thing!

Here’s a screenshot of the Trocaire homepage:

And here’s its twin sister from Concern:

I think Trocaire’s design is probably a little older – hence it’s the one that has been ‘heavily drawn on’. So stand up the designer of Concern and tell us – are you the same person who did Trocaire? Or just heavily lacking in the ideas department?

PS – while we’re on the subject of not-for-profits website design, can I just say that now nearly 80% of our work on the Rose Project has been hacked away from whatever pro bono ‘designer’ they’ve got on the job. Am actually going to take that site out of my portfolio as it’s not reflective of the kind of work we do. Note the pictures of the organisers at various ‘do’s’ shoved in above the stories of the real people being helped? We were asked to deliver a site that matched a brief of tell the stories about people that are being helped and make it easy to donate. That’s what we did.

What they’ve done now is insert lots of back page of Tatler type images, hide the donate button and instead feature the organisation’s mission statement.