Substance and Style

    Ten Tips For Your Nonprofit’s Website 

    ·

    1. Start with your goal. This is true for any website, and for any piece of marketing. You have to know what you want your website to do before you can figure out how to do it. For most organizations, the overarching goal will be to bring in revenue; everything else will support that goal.
    2. Keep on brand. Your messaging and design needs to be consistent across all platforms. Hopefully your website will be designed before you create social media channels and physical collateral like brochures. Your website will likely be the way most people are introduced to you. If you do have other marketing materials in place already, make sure you design your site in keeping with the look and tone of everything else. If your website is the first thing you’re designing, take some time to think about branding before you begin. For more on branding, read this article.
    3. Focus on education. Your website is the best place to go into detail about your mission. The best way to gain support is to make sure people know about you. What do you do, and why is it important? Make sure the answers to those questions are easy to find and compelling.
    4. Ask for what you need. People do not like to guess. Have prominent Calls to Action for the things you need most (donations, volunteers, sponsors, etc.). The last thing you want is to discourage people who want to help you. No one wants to look through 20 webpages to figure out how to give you money or time.
    5. Have a way to take payments online. Even if you have no web design expertise, and you don’t want to be responsible for the security of credit card information, you can take payments online safely and easily. Even with the cheapest paid WordPress plan, for example, you can take payments through a third party with zero hassle.
    6. Make your contact information easy to find!
    7. Make your site navigation simple and easy. Set things up in a way that makes sense to most people. Have the basic pages (Home, About, Services, etc.) as your main menu items, with sub items following in a sensible way (for example, under About: mission, job opportunities, and contact). Make an outline of everything that will be on your site, and use that outline as the basis for building your navigation menus.
    8. Keep each page to a few ideas. Don’t have too much going on on any one page. Clutter is the enemy of good design.
    9. Make sure your site is responsive. It should display correctly no matter what kind of screen the viewer is using. Fortunately, most newer themes and options on most platforms will be responsive without your having to do anything extra. If you have an older site, you may need to change to a newer theme or update your settings. Just make sure you preview your site for all devices. People looking at your site on a phone should have as good a user experience as those looking at it on a laptop.
    10. Make sure your site is as accessible as possible. Even if your organization doesn’t serve the disability community, show some solidarity. It’s the right thing to do. Additionally, there is every chance that accessibility on the web will be a legal requirement eventually, so it’s best to keep your site as accessible as possible from the beginning. For tips on accessibility, read this article.