Figure A shows you the latest news from different charities in the UK. Note that although the site is quite interesting, sometimes things don't always work out, as you can see from the missing image in the screen shot. On the other hand, let the Web master who's never had a missing image throw the first stone.

FIGURE A


You can get the latest news on your favorite charity at the Charity Hub. Roll over picture for a larger image.

CharityHub is run using Domino and, according to the site's operators, employs ways to maximize site hits and auto-generate content.

For example, when charities upload an article they have to fill in keywords relating to the content. Merchant Technology then built a fairly advanced LotusScript agent (based on a DLL library code set) that would search for similar articles and populate the five most relevant in the right margin of the article. This was not only useful for the user wanting to read more articles on that thread, but generated more content for each article.

The site uses some other methods to gather reader information. For example, they use an "email this article to a friend" on each article as a classic hit generator for the site. The clever part is to capture the two email addresses for emailing purposes and add in the charities' fundraising push for that month. [DominoPower also offers an "email this article to a friend" feature, but in deference to our readers' desires, we don't send additional mailings unless they're requested. -- DG]

In the charities upload area the Web developers provided a way for charities to place a small ad line, with an expiration date, to be added to any related mailers that go out.

CharityHub Tech Director Matt Penton explains that they "also provide a standard weekly newsletter that takes a small part of an article and an appropriate link and we email it out to users that have registered. All of these features were written in LotusScript. We have used the standard Domino user registration template and modified it to be used in conjunction with the CharityHub forums."

The developers also built a fairly advanced search script that stops anyone posting obscenities to the forums. The charities were concerned about this because they have a reputation to maintain. Penton addressed these concerns by saying, "Obviously, discussion forums are a great way for a Web site to self- generate content. Although we did stipulate to participating charities that they have to login once a week to answer any questions or points raised in the forums." A lot of the charities have their own Web presences and wanted to use CharityHub alongside their existing Web sites. A filtered URL link was provided which links directly to their news which helped CharityHub look like an extension of their own site.