Webinar - Preparing for a Website Redesign

Is your website from 1995? Do you get frequent comments that your site is old, unattractive, difficult to use, or out of date? Are you frustrated because you don't know how to update your website and you have to call your tech volunteer or contractor every time you want any changes? Do you want a website that is "dynamic"?

If you're answered YES to the questions above - not to worry! You are certainly not alone! Yesterday's webinar with guest speaker Tierney Smith (Community Manager at TechSoup Canada) took attendees through everything you need to know to prepare for a successful website redesign. This is just SOME of the awesome material Tierney covered:

• Definition of a Content Management System (CMS)
• How building your website in a CMS will allow you to update it easily in the future (without needing to call your IT person!)
• The process of designing and developing a website
• Different planning stages you need to go through and what to expect

Check out the recording below for more goodies!

10 Tips for Improving your Website

Your website is one of your most important communication tools. Not only is it a place to convey information, it is a place to promote your organization, what you do, engage your visitors, and have people actually complete transactions.

Your website is about building trust in the brand of your organization. Ten years ago, if a company you wanted to buy something from didn't have a website it wouldn't have been a big deal. You would have looked in the phone book and called them up. Now, there is a lack of trust in companies and nonprofits that don't have websites. Increasingly, it's about finding the information you need on a website, not just the site itself that's important.

And yet for so many of us, the website is somewhat of an afterthought. We say things like "Oh yeah, we have to update the website again" or "we're doing a newsletter, we should add it to the website." Instead, we should be thinking about how much value we can get out of the communication that's there.

Below we have put together a list of 10 tips to help improve your website.

1. PUT YOUR AUDIENCE FIRST – Too many charities sit down to plan the content and flow of their websites thinking "what information do we need to share." That’s the wrong place to start! Instead, answer the question: "why are people coming to my website? What do they need from us?"
2. GET ORGANIZED – Plan a clear, easy-to-understand menu with your audience in mind. Confusion is the last thing you want your audiences to feel when they get to your website, and yet we're such a bad judge of how information should be laid out on a site – we are too close to the internal structures of our own organizations.
3. DESIGN WITH YOUR AUDIENCE IN MIND – Now that you are thinking about your audience, you also want to make sure that the design of your site itself responds to their needs. This includes the layout of information, the use of graphics and where to place your menu items.
4. WRITE FOR THE WEB – Writing for the web is different than writing for other media. Remember everyone online is in a hurry and is impatient, and they don't care as much about your organization as you do. They want the information they want, when they want it. Readers will only actually read 20% of the words on a page. The general rule is to take what you've written, cut it in half and then cut it in half again, and you've got the information that you need.
5. MAKE IT EASY TO CONTACT AND CONNECT – At the beginning we talked about connecting and contacting your organization being some of the things that people want to do online – so don't make that hard! It’s not just about your mailing address either. It's also about connecting in terms of volunteering, donating, or joining your online communities.
6. KEEP IT UP TO DATE – Avoid having info on your site that is out of date. Your website should build trust, engagement, and information that isn't timely will not do that.
7. DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE – There are three ways for people to get to your site: entering your site address directly into a browser, linking from an external source, or searching from a search engine. You want to optimize each of those traffic sources: 1) promote your website everywhere; 2) promote your site to partners; 3) search engine optimization.
8. TRACK YOUR STATS – If we acknowledge that websites are the important communications and marketing tools that they are, then it’s time for us to get strategic about how we understand their usefulness. Web statistics take the guesswork out of understanding what’s happening on our sites. Google Analytics is a free and very robust analytics package for your website. It takes some technical skills to implement, but it is a very good set of tools once it’s in place
9. CONDUCT USABILITY TESTING – Usability testing is simply getting users to navigate through your website and observing them as they do. This is important because it will give you very important insight about how people use your website. We are most often too close to our organizations and websites to understand how users who have never encountered our information before will react to it. We think of course people know how to find information on the site because we find it easy. Even one short usability test will point you to sources of confusion and frustration on your site.
10. DON'T WAIT FOR A REDESIGN – Fix major sources of frustration on your site immediately.