Creating a Crowdfunding Website With WordPress

There have been many crowdfunding websites, but ever since Kickstarter the whole game has changed. This is a website that has helped hundreds of different little companies kick start their business and produce exceptional products. And where did the money come from – people who think that the idea is great. This is the perfect scheme – you tell people that you can start building the future now and they give you money to do that, if they want of course.

However, the bigger websites are clogged with lots of projects and sometimes it might be hard for people to discover your project. Or perhaps you want to help other people gather money for their projects as well. Anyways, you can create a website with just that purpose, with the help of WordPress.

Before we dig in deeper on the subject, we want you to keep in mind that there is very little chance that you will achieve the same success that websites like Kickstarter have. They have lots of publicity, and they have also spent thousands of dollars on developers who have nearly perfected the platform. WordPress is just a platform that will allow you to easily create a similar website which has most of the features of crowdfunding websites.

A Crowdfunding Plugin

One way to create a website with which you can crowdfund projects is to use the plugin “Crowdfund”. The name should be pretty straightforward at what the plugin does. It’s created by Astoundify and it practically has everything you need to create a fully functional crowdfunding website.

What this plugin does is that it allows you to create projects (it could be only one – yours) and set the options and settings for them. For instance, in the manner of Kickstarter, you can set ‘rewards’ for people who pledge a certain amount of money to the project. This is a very popular and effective way of gathering money for your projects. Other features include integration with payment systems so you can collect the donations easily, without having to work with code and APIs.

There are also lots of other settings which allow you to customize and personalize the way that your website will behave. For instance, unlike most of the other crowdfunding websites, Crowdfund allows you to choose how long donations are going to be gathered for a certain project. We have to remind you that the money is going to be given to the project owner only if the goal is reached, or after the end date.

However, there is also an option which allows you to create a project without an end date. This will practically turn the plugin into a donation machine – with no end date, payments are processed immediately. Unlike with dated projects, when the payments will be processed after the project period is over.

Even though we mentioned that you can create projects by yourself, it is also possible for your visitors to create projects as well. If you’ve set up a registration and login system, you will be able to give your users the opportunity of creating projects as well. However, we recommend that you take the necessary precautions when registering new users who are interested in using the website’s crowdfunding features.

Crowdfunding Themes

The problem with plugins is that they, in no way, change how your website looks. And sometimes the design of a website can be the difference between a person donating or not. This is because a better design usually leads people to thinking that the website has more credibility. If you went to a website which had a design that even a high school student could create, would you think that it’s credible?

Of course, there are themes that have been created especially for crowdfunding websites. They have both designs and features which fit such websites perfectly. There is a large option base. There are both themes which look like Kickstarter, and themes which have taken another route and have developed their own design.

One thing to note is that the themes themselves aren’t going to allow you to create a crowdfunding website. They merely give you the base for it. But most of the recently created themes come with the Crowdfunding plugin. So, in a way, the theme allows you to create a crowdfunding website. You don’t have to pay anything extra for the themes that come with the plugin.

One example of a good theme for crowdfunding websites is Funfidy. It’s really elegant and it has a very clean design that is fully responsive and retina ready. What the latter means is that people will be able to visit and donate directly from their mobile devices.

The theme offers you a good base for creating such a website because it has lots of features which make it easier for the visitors to find the project that they want to fund. For instance, you can categorize all of the projects and create a filter which will only show projects from a specific category. This is very nifty and it does save lots of time for people who want to help, but don’t know what to fund exactly.

You can see a demo of the theme here, and here – more information about it. We really recommend it.

Conclusion

We recommend that you used both a theme and a plugin – not just the plugin. Having a better design which also has the features that you need for a crowdfunding website is going to give you both more credibility and more space to move. You will have more creative freedom and you will be able to deliver a better package of features.