- Start with your goal. All marketing endeavors, including building a website, should start with a goal. 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.
- 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 your organization. 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 through a third-party service like PayPal or Stripe.
- Make your contact information easy to find!
- 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.
- Keep each page to a few ideas. Don’t have too much going on on any one page. Clutter is the enemy of good user experience.
- Make sure your site is responsive. It should display correctly no matter what kind of screen the viewer is using. Your web designer or developer will know how to make your site work for mobile devices. If you’re building your own site using WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, you’ll have access to newer themes that automatically calculate breakpoints for you and make your site work correctly on all screen sizes.
- Make sure your site is as accessible as possible. If you receive any federal funding or pass-through funding from federal sources, you can lose that funding if your site isn’t 508 compliant. You can also be sued for having an inaccessible website whether you receive federal funding or not. Read this post to learn how to make your site as accessible as it should be.
Nonprofit Development Academy 