Ask for donations

Assuming you have a website providing a valuable service to your visitors, why not ask for donations to help fund it? Hosting is not always cheap, especially if your site is popular and you have to buy more bandwidth to support the traffic.

Paypal could well be the answer, which serves another purpose other than being the main buying and selling medium for eBay. By upgrading your free PayPal account to the Business/Premier version, you can generate a chunk of code for a donations button which is pasted directly into your site.

1. Visit www.paypal.com and go to the “Merchant Tools” section. Click “Upgrade to a Business Account Now” in the “Website Payments” section. Now you’ll be prompted to log back in. Upon doing so, click “Merchant Tools” and then “Donations”
2. Fill in your payment details in the web form. Choose donation amount, payment ID, currency type and security settings. The donation button for your page can be customised at this stage too.
3. When you’re happy with the form settings, click “Create button” to view the HTML code. Copy and paste it into your webpage layout code, and preview your site to the see the button. If you decide you want to change the appearance you can edit the parameters and get a new HTML code

Tips

While it is free to send and receive payments using PayPal, by upgrading to a Business/Premier account, you will incur a small fee each time a payment is received.