BZUFA

The Birzeit University Friends Association funds students. It has done for decades, through scholarships, donations and the goodwill of alumni scattered across the world — and almost none of that was visible online. A graduate in Santiago or Amman who wanted to give had no straightforward way to do it, and no way to see what the last person's money had actually done.

The association also had something to sell. Palestinian embroidery and handmade heritage crafts, made by people whose work deserves a wider audience than a table at an event, with the proceeds going back to students. That needs a shop, and a shop is a different kind of thing from a foundation's website — different visitors, different trust to earn, different reason to return.

Two sites, one organisation. The association's own site carries who it is and what it has done: its story, its board and executive management, the milestones behind it, the scholarships it funds, the partners it works with, and the success stories of students who came through it. Alongside those sit a news archive, a gallery, an FAQ and the practical pages a real organisation needs.

Giving, made a two-minute job. Donations are taken on the site by card, with the legal terms stated plainly and accepted before payment rather than buried in a footer, and with protection against the automated abuse that any public payment form attracts. Someone deciding at eleven at night to support a student should not have to email anyone to do it.

A shop that stands on its own. The crafts store has its own catalogue with search and filtering, a cart that survives leaving and coming back, and a checkout that does not ask for more than it needs. It also carries the part most stores leave out: where the money goes, and what buying something here actually funds.

The association runs both itself. Publishing news, updating pages and managing what appears on the site are all done through an admin area, so nothing routine needs a developer.

The site is Arabic, and reads right to left. Not as a translation layer added over an English original — as the direction the whole thing is laid out in. That is a decision with consequences everywhere: which side a heading sits on, which way an arrow points, where a form label lands, how a number sits inside a sentence.

It matters because of who this is for. The association's community is in Palestine and spread across a diaspora, and a Palestinian foundation whose website reads as an English site with Arabic pasted in has already said something about who it thinks its audience is.