Top Tips to Streamline Your Nonprofit’s Next Website Redesign
It’s important to keep your nonprofit’s website fresh and updated so that it stays relevant with your audiences, reinforces your organization’s brand, and communicates effectively with current and prospective donors and constituents. But it can be easy to over-engineer your website design because you want to communicate so many things to site visitors.
There are downsides to overly-complicated website designs, though: It makes it hard for people to find information. It can also take longer to create/test, take more time to load in web browsers, and end up being more expensive to design and maintain. That’s why it’s important to streamline your website redesign as much as possible.
Find out if it’s time for a website redesign for your nonprofit:
Get the guide, How to Know it’s Time for a New Website for Your Nonprofit
- Ask for feedback about your current website.
Ask a variety of stakeholders and constituencies for their thoughts about your current website. Include donors, volunteers, service recipients, board members, and staff members. Ask them what they like and dislike about the current website design and navigation, including how easy it is to find information and take actions, such as donating or signing up for an event. Consider their input as you think about how to streamline your website navigation. - Use a human-centered website design approach.
Site visitors come to your site to get information or take action. So, it can be helpful to use a “jobs mentality” with your site redesign in which you consider which jobs, or tasks, site visitors are going to your site to accomplish – such as learning how to obtain services, finding out about upcoming events, registering for an event, donating, or signing up to volunteer.To help streamline your design, think about what your site visitors want to accomplish, make those items stand out, and label sections and calls-to-actions with terms that correspond with what your site visitors want to do.
- Think mobile-first.
With so many people using mobile devices, it’s important to design your website as mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly. That means designing it specifically to be viewed on mobile devices. This approach makes your web pages easier to navigate and interact with, as well as faster to load, on mobile devices. - Streamline online forms.
A long form can be a big turnoff when someone goes to donate, volunteer, or sign up for a campaign or event. Site visitors might give up before completing a long form, and long forms can take too much time to process. They also take longer to build in the first place.To make your website more efficient, ask for only the information you need to process the donation, event registration, or other task. Your forms will be easier to build and maintain, your site visitors will be more likely to complete the forms, and your forms will process faster.
- Use web design templates.
Setting up and using page templates makes it much faster and easier to build new pages and update existing pages. Templates can also be designed with minimal code so that pages load more quickly.Many content management systems (CMS) and website design tools include web page design template capabilities. And for repeated elements throughout your website, many web design tools allow you to create a library of code-efficient, pre-tested snippets – such as buttons, image blocks, and text sections – to further streamline page building.
When it’s time for your nonprofit’s next website design refresh, be sure to keep efficiency top of mind. Your website will work faster, be easier to maintain, and provide a better overall experience for you and your constituents.
Need help with your next website redesign?
Cathexis Partners is ready to assist: Contact us to get started.
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by Andrea Fleisher, Account Manager, Cathexis Partners and Jane Kramer, Account Manager, Cathexis Partners
