Did you know that people are spending less time on websites then they did a year ago, according to a Google Analytics benchmark report released in early July? Getting your target audiences to stay on your website is no easy feat. But with the right web design planning tips, your organization will be on its way to building a website that gives your audiences exactly what they need.
Survey Your Audience
Before your organization spends money and staff time on building a website, make sure you survey your audience and key stakeholders to ensure you're creating a website that will resonate with them. Ask them for feedback on your current site such as:
- Do you find our website useful?
- Is it easy to navigate and find the information you are looking for?
- What specifically do you like about our website?
- Why do you come to our website?
- What don’t you like about our website?
- How could we improve our website to make it more useful to you?
Don’t have money for focus groups? No problem. There are a variety of inexpensive online survey tools that you can use such as Survey Monkey that will work just fine.
When doing user surveys try to keep them to 10 questions.
Objectives
Define what your key objectives are for your organization’s website.
If you could only accomplish three things with your website, what would they be? While your website can certainly accomplish more then three things, this exercise will force you to prioritize what your top three goals are in your website design or redesign.
Target Audiences
Define your target audiences. Why are your target audiences coming to your website? Is it to learn more about an issue you are working on? To renew their membership? What key information do they need from your website? Note, what information they need from you, will not always match up with what information you think that they need or that your staff will want to prioritize.
Messaging
What is the one main message you want to convey through your website that your organization really wants your target audiences to remember?
Get Your Audience Involved
Don’t let your website be all about you, you, you. That’s dull and boring. Give your audiences opportunities to get involved with your organization and build in community. What actions can they take on your website? What sections will they be able to voice their opinions in or share resources? Be sure and also build in social sharing functionality so web visitors can quickly share content on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Stumble Upon, etc.
Navigation
What menu sections will be the most intuitive to your target audiences that will help them easily find the information they are looking for that also aligns with your website objectives? When you finalize it, be sure and do some user testing. Ideally it would be great to do the user testing with a mix of people such as people who visit your website often, members, and people who may not be as familiar with your website or organization. The latter is an important audience to do user testing with because you will want to cultivate new people with your website and ensure they get your mission and resources quickly.
Design
Personality
This is your organization’s opportunity to really think about its brand – how your organization perceives itself internally and how other people outside of your organization view it. Toss out several adjectives to describe the personality of your new website. Is it edgy? Professional and corporate like? Youthful? Stay away from generic words like informative. All websites should be informative.
Color Palette and Design Elements
What color palette do you want to use through out your website? Think about your branding. Do you have a brand book? If you do, you will want to use that as a guide.
What assets do you have to work with internally? Photos, videos, audio, etc?
Look at Websites for Inspiration
What design elements do you like from other websites? Note, this does not mean you have to like the entire website. Pick out some elements that really resonate with you. Be sure your stakeholders are part of this process too. You don’t want to think about your design in a bubble. At the same time, you also want to recognize that design is subjective and people will have different opinions.
Who are the Competitors?
Take a look at websites that do similar work to your organization. Evaluate their websites so you can learn from them. What are they doing better then you online? For example, perhaps they have a more intuitive navigation structure? More interactive components that are fostering discussion on their website? Where do they need improvement? Seize those opportunities to position your website as the “go to” resource.
What Websites Don’t You Like?
This is the easy part. It’s much easier to identify websites that you don’t like then it is to find websites that wow you. This step is an important part of the website design planning process because it will give your designers clear directions on design elements that you want them to stay clear of when designing your organizations website.
The Technical
There’s a lot of technical considerations that your organization will need to think about when designing a website. Here are a few to consider:
- What CMS (content management system) will you be using? Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Expression Engine?
- What CRM (constituent relationship management system) will you be using to capture people’s information when they sign up for an enewsletter? Salsa Labs, Convio, Blackbaud, MailChimp, etc?
- Will you be processing credit cards either for donations or ecommerce?
- How would you like your publishing workflow to work among staff?
- What kind of automated feeds would you like integrated into your website?
- How tech savvy is your target audience? Do they have access to broadband? Don't assume that your audiences have access to broadband. Even in 2011, there are plenty of people in the U.S and abroad who still don't have broadband.
Stay-tuned for part two of this series on the Web Design Checklist your organization should use in your website design.
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